A Few Thoughts On Life & Learning

The Genetics of Human Diversity

As a youth, B.F. Skinner was all the rage and Beyond Freedom and Dignity was atop the bestsellers list for, it seemed like, years.  Skinner did not invent behaviorism, even among psychologists.  But behaviorism, molding human behavior to fit whatever needs, can be traced to the first kings of Mesopotamia or Egypt, or probably anywhere where controlling other human beings became something of an imperative to assume control over them.  So civilized man has always practiced a modality to conform behavior that did not conform to his genetic needs he had needed to successfully evolve.

I guess I must have encountered the book a year or two after its release.  When I had finished I told my companions who had insisted it would change my life, that it was a blueprint for human interaction into the future without conflict.  I must have replied it was bullshit and it was a blueprint that every king or dictator in history had ever used to maintain authority.  They said no, there’s nothing totalitarian here, if we would carry out his methods everyone would be kind and nations would be at peace, etc, etc.  Remember in my opening essay I indicated there was a sinister conformism in utopic thought that assumed if everyone just behaved uniformly kind that presumed humankind were somehow robotic and that any society would welcome and be peaceful and kind and trouble free if we could learn such robotic interactions and that it impressed me as a proposition of benign and mindless behavioristically false totalitarianism.

Well I thought the same of Skinner’s thesis.  It was any totalitarian saying everyone will be… if…when… we all behave my way.  It was Felix Frankfurter sanctioning sterilization from the supreme court bench when he proclaimed, “...three generations of idiocy is enough.”  Okay, no abortion, but sterilize any who are not how I want them to be.  (And to my knowledge, even though it is no longer carried out to any degree, has never been refuted, “overturned” in American jurisprudence.

So other studies were also going on, and I wish to turn to them shortly.  But I’m going to sidetrack to a few biographical sketches of my personality.  

Some might say my parents didn’t have enough interest or at least didn’t project enough authority over me.  I ran rather free, so to speak, at a very young age.  By three I was walking all over Muncie, Indiana, visiting different neighborhoods, entering stores on my own, etc.  Of course some will reply times were different then and there was not as much crime or danger to a child.  But Muncie was not that small and the black population was substantial, and I spent a great deal of time in those neighborhoods.  Probably, in many white eyes, too much.  At least when I tried to bring my black playmates into white neighborhoods I was told they couldn’t be in their neighborhood.  But while parents in both neighborhoods were, at first, somewhat aghast that I was wandering around unattended, they got used to it.  And some of the black mothers  would let me “sweep” their floor, or “help” wash their dishes, and they would give me a nickel.  

I don’t know when my mother taught me to read, but I can’t remember never being able to not know how to read. One of my frequent journeys was to the public library.  It was in the white neighborhood.  Black children could not enter.  The only libraries available to them were “school” libraries.  I guess blacks could attend Ball State where my parents were attending as the first black graduate was Jessie Nixon in 1925, but I can’t ever recall seeing any blacks when I ventured there. Certainly the local schools were segregated, not officially, that had ended in 1949 by Indiana statute, but as the neighborhoods were almost 100% segregated, of course the schools were as well.  But it was long after Brown in 1954 that the courts began to shift focus towards desegregating northern schools.  In Indiana the first effort was Bell v. School City of Gary in 1963, followed by Copeland v. South Bend School Corporation in 1967, but Banks v. Muncie Community Schools didn’t actually happen until 1970, the same year bussing began in Indianapolis.  And I believe that might have been the first city of court-ordered bussing. Possibly, I’m wrong, but on its heels bussing was ordered in Gary who was still resisting efforts to properly segregate.  Of course, the issue, or the defense of the state, was always that schools were desegregated and had been before Brown, but the desegregation hadn’t occurred because housing hadn’t become desegregated and there were even barriers like needing passes for blacks to enter into white neighborhoods, and most stores had signs on who could be served in their windows,  Whites only, blacks only, and a few in the downtown shopping district that might cater to both.  But sometimes signs would announce “Serving blacks between…” and “whites only between…”.  Presumably whites could shop during black hours idf they chose to. Being only three, black stores let me enter, and of courseI frequently did enter stores that catered to both during black hours.  What I couldn’t do was go to the movies and sit in the black section.  When The Robe was released one of the black families I visited were planning on going to the matinee to see it.  I don’t know if they had asked me previously if  I would like to go with them, or if I was just there that afternoon, but we walked to the theater where it was playing and the mother paid for four tickets, for herself, her two children and me.  And then we entered and began to walk up the stairs to the balcony where black seating was permitted.  But we were stopped.  “He”--pointing to me– “can’t go up there.”  “Well I bought him a ticket and he’s only three.”  “Well I don’t really care whether you bought him a ticket or didn’t buy him a ticket, he can’t sit in the balcony—see the sign, it says ‘blacks only”.  “It’s okay, I’ll just sit in the white section,” I said.  But then the mother got nervous and asked if she could at least take me to a seat in the white section. No, she was told she couldn’t even enter the white section.  Could she at least watch from the door until I found a seat.  Again, no. Again I tried to say it was alright, I could sit by myself.  But now that was also forbidden.. If I was only three, I was too young to sit anywhere, unattended.  So I said I was sorry and I would just go home and they could go on and watch it.  But the mother became a bit concerned and decided we would all go home together.  

I never saw The Robe, or read the book.  In fact for many years afterwards if I saw the title in a library I would turn it around backwards so no one could see its title.  Perverse bit of revenge.

I think I became very ashamed of my skin color that day.  And while I can’t say the experience is comparable, how many times in life does a black person have to feel ashamed about their skin color, how many times? How many times?

But I was pretty bold as a child, I was seemingly unafraid and didn’t understand fear at that age.  I learned fear later, but I refused to let fear prevent me from walking in East St. Louis the morning after Martin Luther King died during the aftermath of a riot,  I refused to let it stop me from hitchhiking after harrowing encounters, or after eleven attempted robberies while driving a taxi.  In fact I refused to refuse a passenger even if I was suspicious of the passenger, and eventually it was the cab company that severed my lease because I’d had too many encounters.  It was not that they didn’t get their lease fee,, I had to pay them their lease whether I was robbed or not, but they just felt I didn’t have enough sense to be safe. 

In a moment I’m going to talk about personality type, but there is a contradiction in what the study presents.  They will say one determinant of a personality type can be observed at a first time at a swim pool.  My type, according to the study, of the bold child is generally demonstrated by a headlong rush into the water.  The shy introverted type often screams and does not want to enter the water, the timid personality.  But my first experience at the pool should have indicated I was of that personality.  I screamed so loudly and continued to scream to stay out of the water and it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I ventured into a pool and swam on one side and with one arm, always keeping my mouth and nose from even having the opportunity of getting water into it.  But there may be a reason for that.  It’s not in my memory, it's only what my grandfather told me that he thought was the reason.  He told me as an infant my mother was bathing me in a bassinet and turned me over and water got into nose and open mouth and my grandfather noticed I was turning bluish and pulled me out of the water and they ended up needing to take me to the hospital because they couldn’t pat the water out of me.  It may be true, because later I would spend some time in the Caribbean and I would snorkel and descend under the water with the mask and breathe through the snorkel, but without it I continued to swim on one side, and I continued to be wary of water and boats never felt at all safe to me. But other than water, I never presumed fear and never let challenges detract me, although I was often not too good and I lost interest in sky diving after attending training and making one dive.  But I suppose I went through challenging, or daring it.  But I don’t think I was a daredevil in the sense of an Evel Knievel.   But I did have an uncle who drove in the figure eight circuit and when he got injured I subbed for him for a short while.  It really didn’t appear that dangerous to me. Kind of like playing bumper cars with full sized vehicles.  But much more secure with inner metal bars and of course, double strapped seat belts and the seat was pretty solidly anchored to the ground.  But everyone said I was totally nuts and risking my life. But I never felt I was risking my life in any way.  But there were times where I did feel timid, like East St Louis the day after King died, but to me the point was to walk firmly and act as if I was undaunted.  And that taught me that if you act fearlessly, no matter what you are feeling inwardly, people will generally be to some degree intimidated from harming you.  Of course I’m white, and I’ve never heard of a group of black arming themselves and jumping into vehicles and chasing down a white person who entered their neighborhood.  It may have happened, I haven’t heard of it.  But what I have encountered white people who attempted to hurt me both while hitchhiking and driving for hire. But only once in my entire life did any black people attempt an attack.  That was a couple of teenagers and they had a whip. I heard them running from behind and turned just in time as the one with the whip swung it at me and I was able to grab it with my hand and yank it away.  I then took off running and I was always pretty fast and I soon outdistanced them.  But the point is not that I was some mad risk taker. I’m perhaps the biggest coward I know.  I certainly never found that sometimes you have to be a man.  The reason I didn’t cower or attempt to avoid people who others might find threatening is that the odds of someone trying to harm me was probably 0.1%, perhaps less.  It was not, as the cab co said, I didn’t have enough wariness of others, experience taught be to be wary, and as such I could diffuse most situations, but when I couldn’t, experience also taught me that almost no one really did want to hurt me and so I refused to assume the worst of everyone, or anyone, since hardly anyone would exhibit such inclination.  I drove a taxi for probably a dozen years and averaged 40 rides a shift for 313 days a year. That means I had roughly 150,240 passengers (assuming in each ride was one passenger, but probably half had more.  Eleven attempted to rob or hurt me.  Is that really being a risk taker when experience showed me it was not unsafe.  So I maintained my faith that I was not doing anything like risking my life by driving passengers.  And those 11—well, in that many hours of driving, the greater risk was probably from other drivers and being hurt in a car accident, so rather than illustrate the wickedness of others, it taught me the overall goodness of most.  

My parents got out of college, my dad a year earlier, but got jobs in separate locales for a semester, then my mother moved to his locale for the second semester.  I should have been in school but couldn’t attend, I believe because my mother would have been my teacher and the school wouldn’t permit it. That may not have been the reason, maybe it was because I now had a record of being expelled from the previous school.  The teachers and I had conflicted over finger painting, why go to school to learn that?  I don’t want to read Dick and Jane but I want to read Moby Dick.  You’re too young to read that, why am I too young to read that?  I walked to the public library and checked  out Moby Dick.  I could read the words and probably learned several new ones, but it was tough going and I couldn’t clearly follow but I sure didn’t tell the teachers that and kept insisting I didn’t need to fingerpaint and read Dick and Jane. If I am coming to school, then I want to learn something, I don’t know what does my age have to do with what I don’t know and what I want to learn?  At recess the kids would gather round and I would criticize the teachers and pontificate and they would laugh and think I was funny and weird and after class  I was always invited to visit someone every day, they would fight over whose house I should go to.  But the teachers found me immature and socially disruptive and I ended up being expelled.  It was my mother who told me I couldn’t go to school when she reunited with my father in Portage because she was the teacher.  Probably she told me the truth.

My parents separated again and I went with my mother on an endless bus trip to California on old state and US highways, before the interstate highways were built.  I loved the trip, the scenery, and the cultural diversity I observed,  and hated the bus ride.  Anytime I’ve ever needed to take a bus ride since, well, there’s really little of cultural America to observe and the rides are still horrid. 

Well no need to write an autobiography, here, I am really trying to illustrate my personality type as a singular type of personality diversity, albeit one often considered “strange” and at odds with the community.  But I sort of had a dual-biography.  In my childhood , I was given great freedom by parents, and encouraged to share ideas.  Okay, my mother taught me to read at a young age.  I’m not particularly brilliant and many others have accomplished the same, at least, with the same opportunity.  Unfortunately I was in some ways I was a misnomer in that in early childhood I had an opportunity that most people of my economic class, or the class I was born into, did not have to learn to read. I had another advantage over many of my earliest life-companions, and is relevant to why I talked about the racial environment in Indiana in my early childhood.  Yes, it probably affected my future emotional thought-development.  But it could have the opposite effect.  I could have developed thought patterns that were more in line with since I had not had been confined to my early economic environment and my parents had been able to succeed (via my family) into a middle class environment, and my father to an even greater success later in life. 

There are many good studies that show the exact opposite of Skinner’s behaviorism and the environment-only perspective.  I’m going to refer you here to a few of them:

Bratko D, Butković A, Vukasović T. Heritability of personality. Psychological Topics, 26 (2017),    1, 1-24.

Manuck SB, McCaffery JM. Gene-environment interaction. Annu Rev Psychol. 2014;65:41-70. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115100. PubMed: 24405358

Power RA, Pluess M. Heritability estimates of the big five personality traits based on common genetic variants. Translational Psychiatry (2015) 5, e604; doi:10.1038/tp.2015.96; published online 14 July 2015. PubMed: 26171985 PubMed Central: PMC5068715

The Pluess-Power study shows that, “Temperament, however, does not have a clear pattern of inheritance and there are not specific genes that confer specific temperamental traits. Instead, many (perhaps thousands) of common gene variations (polymorphisms) combine to influence individual characteristics of temperament. Other DNA modifications that do not alter DNA sequences (epigenetic changes) also likely contribute to temperament. Large studies have identified several genes that play a role in temperament. Many of these genes are involved in communication between cells in the brain. Certain gene variations may contribute to particular traits related to temperament.”

But even long before the advent of modern research on genetics, developmental differences begin to be observed by longitudinal studies of different responses to similar environments, and also communalities in how similar economic environments could create emotional triggers within those personalities, sort of “long memories'' that are probably genetically induced that create long emotional-thought patterns and that personalities would react differently to similar stimuli. A good overview of that work was published by Glen Elder in the Feb 1998 issue of Child Development, pp. 1-12, “Life Course as Development Theory.”    In the 1950’s Thomas and Chess began studying differing responses in infants to similar stimulations and followed those children through early childhood and began to recognize temperaments were not blank slates that could thereafter be molded in  certain ways, that temperaments were inherited and emotional-thought patterns developed by individualistic responses to similar stimuli.  Their initial 1963 publication, Thomas A, Birch H, Chess S, Hertzig M, Korn S. Behavioural individuality in early childhood. New York, NY: New York University Press; 1963, went mostly unnoticed by the broader psychological emphasis on environmental factors affecting personality.  But some did pick up on their studies and while behaviorism was dominating the conversation in the 70’s, some like Rothberg, Calkins, Buss, et. al were quietly showing what contemporary geneticists have shown to be true, that personalities are inherited and similar environments do not similarly affect everyone similarly.  So basically, that people can’t be taught to behave in certain manners, and that personalities are therefore not going to be determined by equal, or similar, situational responses.  More recently Kagan began to focus on complementary-adversarial relationships between parental temperament in response to their child’s temperament.  Kagan showed that just because a child, say, may be shy and inhibited means he will not necessarily grow up to be an anxious and paranoid adult. And recently Schermerhorn and Bates  have focused significantly on the complex transactions that occur between children and parents as a function of both children’s temperament and parenting behavior.  The most consistent findings suggest that both child negative reactivity and self-regulation are predictive of, and predicted by, specific dimensions of parenting behavior.  These findings support the notion that child temperament is part of a dynamic system of dyadic interactions that modifies both caregivers and offspring over time. Not surprisingly, child temperament and parenting behavior also interact to predict subsequent behavior and functioning.  Again, the research findings identify specific dimensions of temperament, notably fearfulness and self-regulation, that are implicated in these interactional pathways, suggesting that some temperament dimensions are more modifiable, or predictive of particular outcomes, than others.  

Now I want to return to my personality,or temperament,  as it is generally called. I cannot speak of every personality, I am aware and conscious of myself and how my environment  affected the development of my own emotional-thought development.  But I do so under the premises of the research I have just outlined, rejecting behaviorism in its totality as a method of developing personality.  I can’t define myself under any of the generalities of  type, nevertheless, research shows generalities or overall tendencies and there are probably many subvariants that develop as the result of the familiar bond that might consequentially  be favorable or non-favorable in developing the child’s temperament. I guess, I was fortunate that both parents allowed my exploratory nature, because if anything, I was a child who needed constant stimulation.  I lacked a lot of imagination, but probably because of that needed an awful lot of continuous stimulation. My father didn’t seem to notice me if I did not notice him.  In 9th grade he was my English teacher. For years I had heard him complain about disruptive behavior in his classes.  But I noticed when I was in his class, he lectured and wrote on the blackboard and paid little attention until the class would become so loud he couldn’t hear himself talking to himself.  Then he would turn around and tell everyone to get back in their seats and sit down and almost immediately retreat back to his back to the class and showing little interest in the class.  He was a very popular teacher, but I don’t know if he ever taught anyone much.  Of course he was the same at home.  When I would ask him a question he would notice me and explain everything and I would pepper him with questions and he could lecture for hours and I would say “what about this, doesn’t this mean that’s not true” and he would pause and go on.  I was in awe of my father,as a child, though.  I thought he knew everything.  The funny thing is I never apparently accepted anything he said as correct in itself, but ideas to seek out and explore.  When I was eleven years however we began to be at odds.  I would tell him he was wrong.   He didn’t get angry, he just stopped the conversation.  That was it.  We couldn’t converse normally any longer.  When I would be in conflict and “disruptive” with my teachers and challenge them, he always thought I was wrong and misbehaved.  I thought I was trying to learn more by challenging the simplicities of commonly accepted ideas, he thought I simply didn’t understand accept any answer was not the answer.  Still, my father was a smart man, he knew a lot of things, but he could never challenge and I could never accept the idea that ideas or facts were not always challengeable.So it was never possible to “conform” me because I had been allowed to explore so many alternatives.  

Not so with my mother.  Opposite my feeling that my father was so intelligent, I always thought my mother was dumb. Of course that wasn’t true, she got an advanced degree and later taught entry level physics at U of Maryland extensions on the bases we lived on.  But she seemed to have no interest in learning.  My father was the party type, and like me, liked being by himself only when he was reading.  That I inherited from him I suppose.  My mother was a wallflower at such gatherings.  She would often abandon him at parties and if they were at our house, as they frequently were, she would retreat to her room and knit. At every location we moved to, she would have one friend only that she would converse with.  But I was not social in the way my father was.  My social activity was about observing different peoples, and at large gatherings I would tend to focus on long conversations with singular individuals.’

I suppose, though,  the reason I thought my mother was somewhat intellectually disconnected was the very thing that made her so important in supporting my curiosity and why she was probably a very responsive parent to my personal growth.  She listened to everything I had thought I had learned from my adventures in exploring both people and books.  No matter what else, and no matter whether she agreed or didn’t she listened, and encouraged me to continue to explore.  She never told me there was only one truth although her responses always seemed to be, “I didn’t know that,” or in any way assisting me in my explorations, she just let me do it, it didn’t matter to her if I was right or wrong, or in agreement with me, but that I had the right to learn for myself  if I was right or wrong.  After I left the church, she wanted me to return but would , after I left home,  we would have conversations on the phone for hours at a time about everything and maybe I’ve been writing all this now, late in my own life, simply because she died of covid ( both vaxxed & boosted) two years ago.  

As I mentioned previously, I had an extremely different experience in life as an adult than as a child.  As a child, teachers frequently found me disruptive, but classmates found me exciting. I frequently won popularity contests which I always thought rather odd since I was never popular within any “group”. But I participated in every group.  I didn’t generally have particular or special friendships but I wanted to visit everyone and be a part of every group.  I would visit one person one day and another the next.  I couldn’t seem to conform to any one set of friends or any one set of personalities, but I didn’t lead any group or was ever a major part of any. And of course there were always a few in every group who thought I should not be a part of their group, but mostly I was accepted by a majority of all of the groups  but the only reason I can imagine I was “popular” was because some of clique or group must have thought that I must be more popular in other groups than I was.  But I also had an advantage, perhaps in growing up in overseas military schools. Military society is very defined and stratified.  There are separate clubs for officers, for chiefs (sergeants) and EM’s.  They do not intermingle socially and amongst officers there are even differing social levels depending on the level of rank.  Wives do not much intermingle away from their husband’s rank either, , or if they do, it is frowned upon.  On the other hand, and probably dissimilar, if  I had grown up on stateside bases it would probably have been different, but in DODDS schools all of the kids lived nearby, and we all attended the same school and the captain’s kid was no more relevant socially than the EM’s kid.  So the child of the EM could go to the captain’s house, or vice versa, and no one thought, or at least acted, as if there was any relevant social standing that needed to be placed upon the kids.  

But when I became an adult and entered the working world, a steelworker was ostracized by the local college students who in return ostracized the arrogance of the college kids.  And trying to participate in any other group was impossible because in the adult world you could not converse or challenge an idea that was “outside the realm” of your status.  I could not as a steelworker, or my other early laboring professions, know enough to know what any other other group knew.  But steelworkers, by god, didn’t think I could challenge or express ideas that I might have picked up from college students (or professors who might have written books) because to the steelworkers those concepts were false.  We steelworkers might have been just as opposed to going to Viet Nam, but if we were drafted we couldn’t protest.  Besides we were opposed to the very idea that college students could be deferred from the draft and we couldn’t.  Life, we saw, was unfair to us.  We “slaved” our butts off and supported their protests and yet we had to go fight the war, and possibly die, so they could stay home and protest against a war and a society that used us as illegitimate citizens with no right to protest anything and even our right to protest—our labor protests were being ignored in preference of other politically liberal ideas.  Well that’s how many felt, at any rate, I tried to straddle the line, but I found it much more difficult to challenge or question or to absorb any culture than that the one I was in.

Well if you take into the genetic studies of personality types and take into account that the first environmental factors that personality encounters to be the parents, and even though they may be very devoted to (“love”) the child, if the personality type of the parent insists on attempting to mold the child to its own personality type, the first stages of personality type are beginning to be denied by the environment.  A parent, far from following any program of child rearing needs to let the child develop his own personality type.

I found myself fortunate in having a mother who had no desire to impose her personality on me.  She saw me as a “good child.”  My father however thought I should conform to his one-only-answer and to never question that answer because there could be no other.  When I would insist that there might be other ways to view any subject, he struck me down. I became agitated.  I was also fortunate that we moved overseas and was schooled in an environment where class, amongst students at least,did not exist. And also that I knew many of my teachers socially and could bring my questions to them outside of class and so they didn’t find me quarrelsome and disruptive in class.  But once again, it seems, the preponderance seemed to like to converse with me and would seek what I thought about what they (the teachers) had told us in class.  If I  didn’t have any nit-picking to do it seems they were often disappointed.  But of course, some amongst my classmates thought I was just an arrogant asshole and didn’t talk to me at all.  For me, it was fortunate, they were always a minority.  But the ones who did converse with me, didn’t converse just because I was an arrogant asshole, because they knew I listened to them as well, I would dialogue with them, and I never insisted I knew more than they do or than what the teachers had taught was wrong (or hardly ever discoverably incorrect) but that there was always other perspectives and right answers were hard to obtain.  As I flitted between social groupings I found I could explain differing perspectives to other groups.  

My father used to want me to not talk with teachers and question them outside of class, he said it was embarrassing to him.  But the teachers seemed to like me to come out and requested me to do so, they would say to my father “what does your son think…?’ Of course it was probably easier for them to discuss ideas because I was not their son.  And sometimes they would invite me to go on trips with them, even without my parents.  That ended in 12th grade when we transferred to bases in Germany and my parents were at different schools and I did not know my teachers.  I seemed to develop the same relationship with the students but I found myself, onceagain,  adversarial to teachers.  I believe I was kicked out of some class almost everyday.  As a result, one teacher blocked my graduation.

But overall my early environment was favorable to my personality.  If people listen and converse, I listen to converse, but if someone wants to oppose me and refuse to allow me to discourse by questioning what they say I can be the biggest asshole.  If someone attempts to take advantage of me I am the most ungenial companion and we can clash into verbal violence.

I hate ignorance but don’t think anyone is”stupid”, or less right than I am.  Ignorance, from my perspective, is a defeated personality who will not try to discover answers.  Ignorance is not the same as inferior intellect, ignorance is a person that has become marginalized and accepted whatever position as an unquestionable opposition to himself who has only his ideas to cling to because he has had his own personality swept away from himself.  The ignorant, the marginalized personality who feels he has no importance to society must cling to any perspective that offers him a reason for his marginalization and feelings that society has no need for him and often that means clinging to undiscoverable knowledge, “false ideologies” that seem to explain why he has become inferior to the other in order to make himself feel more important.  If freedom does not seem real, or democracy doesn’t allow his total participation, then autocracy becomes just as attractive as a flat earth.  Science can be denied, history can be denied, and eventually he attacks what has not given him freedom as undemocratic.  Ignorance is the result of disallowing the growth and the importance of the divergent personalities and so it attacks not personalities that conflict diversely, but he attacks all the “isms” that are supposedly different from him because of whatever ethnicity or class that is different from his.

Now I would like to go back to the beginning of this discussion to the discussion of what I believe is diversity, and that is diversity of personality that was necessary for humans to successfully evolve.  The community needed differing personalities and skills, it was as important to our survival as a species as it was to have our other evolutionary traits.  Our survival didn’t depend on a large brain, but on the many divergent brains that were important to the survival of the whole community.  We couldn’t individually fight predators or conquer prey, but as a community of individually diverse personalities we could do both and we could survive.  Now it is my suggestion that the reason communities migrated was to continue the import of diverse personalities.  I would like to suggest it was always peacefully done.  Probably it wasn’t, and certainly it wasn’t as we moved into the neolithic age and into an environment that required less mobility.  But mobility continued, for a multitude of reasons (see my book There Never Was…) and often became extremely violent.  But the need for diverse personalities  became subterfuge into the need for ethnic identities.  If diversity within a community enabled our successful evolution, it created within our genetic codes the need for allowing every member within the community to be free in the sense that the community needed the diverse individuals in order to survive, and while the individuals certainly needed the whole community to survive, the community could not survive if it relegated any of its members to a lesser status and so the community was immensely dependent of the freedom of its diverse membership.  Along the way, civilization took away that genetic diversity in favor of some taking away the need of some to make the community dependent on the leaders of the community.  This suppressed the individual’s importance to the whole, and in effect created a genetic mental illness that manifested itself both in leaders who needed to enmasse subjugation and within the community who had had their diverse personalities of importance become irrelevant to the community.  Thus freedom became denied.  And so now,  rather than a community of diverse personalities the focus was on the uniqueness ("the ethnicity”) of the singular community with a common personality that opposed the common personalities of other ethnicities.  And ethnicities fought both to survive as a singular community ethnicity and to suppress or even obliterate those personalities.  Migration was to flee to preserve one’s identity as a community or to overcome and suppress those other ethnicities. In this way, I believe, “civilization” destroyed the species that succeeded because of diverse personalities by attempting to categorize them but what civilization never accomplished was to abolish our genetic cultural need to be individually unique and necessary to our community.

I want to leave you with one thought to meander.  Some of the most vicious and ethically conscious groups were nomadic rebels, often herders of some kind.  They were always the most difficult communities to suppress and to absorb into the “kingdom” community.  Now it is commonly assumed these groups to have been led by “strong” or dominant leaders.  And yet examining these groups, we find they did follow dynamic leaders when they needed to defend and they would often go on attack in defense (thus the notions of their brutality) but these communities selected leaders that the individuals within the group thought had the abilities to both preserve their freedom as individuals within the community and to successfully lead their offense against encroachment from that individual freedom.  Just a thought to leave with you about whether you fight to preserve the individuals against conforming or fight to conform and suppress individuals within the community.  And today we find individuals who feel an oppression of their individual relevance seeking leaders who will viciously attack other ethnicities that they feel (or have been told) are the causes of their individual irrelevance to the whole.

So it can be a mixed bag without one answer.  But there might be paths to follow to return importance to individuals.  But whatever road we follow, it cannot be led by those who want to believe they are more important than their followers.