FEED, BREED, OR DIE OFF - THE PRIME DIRECTIVE
All life forms have a Survival Strategy of which there are three components: The Prime Directive for the Primary Group, and the Rules and Roles that results in survival of the primary group. A primary group is one in which the members share a collective concern for survival. They do or they die. The genetic primary group The Selfish Gene (family, clan, tribe) is the principal model for other affiliated non-genetic primary groups like the Office, or the Company, or the Party. The Rules and Roles of one, are the guide for those in the Office, etc.
The Prime Directive is: Feed and Breed. Or, put in a more delicate way, Dinner and a Date, with taking care of what comes after. It's dinner and a date, or the group dies off. The arithmetic of survival is instinctively calculated to compensate for the infant and mother mortality rate. The race to the sea of baby turtles running the gauntlet of birds is predicated on an instinctive estimate of how many will likely return to that same beach and lay eggs.
One persons feeding is another's brood. Women and children first is what the alligator said of the elephants about to cross the river.
Drama enters when the choice is being dinner or the diner ... that is an existential threat, Having a date is when the boys fight over the girls, and the girls compete to be fought over. This is true for dandelions as much as mountain lions.
The other drama is the other is getting laid or not with a chance at passing one's DNA on to successive generations.. Success in both means survival of the aggregate be it family, tribe, nation, herd, pod, or flight. It is as true for dandelions as for mountain lions.
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| It's mating time for the Elk of Estes Colorado. Time for the guys to show up. |
THE ROLES
In Whale, Lion, Dolphin or Elk society, the mechanism for protecting the young is vested in the organization of the women and children who move as a unit, while the guys do guy thing until mating season. Sometimes the mating between a male and at least one female is short often with the guys skipping the birthing. The human family is the only one where an extended visit by the male in the family occurs, although the tradition of guys doing guys things remains in its vestigial form.
In the face of an existential threat (being dinner, or having one) triggers the full aggressive potential of the culture. Women in defense of their children are not any less fierce than a rutting male. Villains exhibit a corruption of the natural force of protecting and nurturing the helpless (victim).
The success of the survival strategy is the maturation of the young to begin the process over again. To this end, the young must be protected from harm , and nurtured to grow. This sets up the three basic functions often allocated to the male or female depending on the strategy: Child as potential Victim, the parents are Nurturer and Protector.
The basic human strategy requires a long period of time during parts of which the female takes on the role of nurturer which the male takes on the role of protector. In other herding species, the female does both roles while the guys are out doing guy things as the Elk of Estes Colorado. Given the infant mortality rate of animals and of humans in primitive conditions, there are two strategies: lots of kids and lots of wives.
Of the dangers posed to the survival of the primary group, one is the life of the young, and the access to the opposite sex. In one case the child is lunch, or is representative of a future threat to the predator which must be killed. The Wildebeest is the Lion's big meal, and when a group of Wildebeest see a lion's cubs in a den, the Wildebeest attack and trample the cubs to death.
Within a species but of a different primary group, the opportunity and motive to plant or receive some out of wedlock bodily fluids, is a mark of success in the survival of the aggressor. That is why women are raped, and children murdered is certain misbegotten parts of the world. This is the Dark Side of the Force, and is Villain to the Hero's dismay.
THE VILLAIN
The attributes of villainy are the Dark Side of the Heroic, different in adverb and adjective. But there may be no fundamental objective difference between hero and villain, except that being a potential lunch colors the hungry as villainous.
Hero vs Villains - Elephants vs Lions
The Villain's version of helpless, nurturer and protector are the 1. Brat, Bitch, and Bastard 2. Voracious, Vindictive, and Vicious or 3. Mad, Manipulative and Murderous.
When creating a villain for your own nefarious purposes, one paints the other side in red, while painting oneself in blue as above. Regardless of the facts, you are always Blue (your self image) and the other guys are Red (what you project on them).
Of special importance when creating villains, is to use the full range of B, V, or M series villain which should evoke a sense of fear and loathing in your target audience. Fear motivates collective action to defend, and loathing incites sufficient violence or other action (donate) in support of the cause. The classic examples of this came from Nazi propaganda, which usually is a safe subject to shoot at.
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| In this the German is presented with fear and loathing for the "Jew" |
Presented with a stimulus like a threat, an individual is expected to react in a certain way. In a normalized world between two individuals there are sequential stimuli, like asking the time, and the other answers with the time. That is a complementary transaction. If however, the response is insulting, this is called a crossed transaction. The classic crossed transaction was presented in the Charlie Brown series of cartoons in which Lucy invites Charlie to kick the football she is holding to the ground. Charlie goes to kick, and Lucy pulls the ball away. Charlie gets a dump, and Lucy gets a dumper stamp for her collection of Awshits and Attaboys.
Serious Games People Play
These collections are called in Transactional Analysis (TA) are stamp collections in which the end result of a ball switch is a payoff often referred to as stamps. There are brown (dump), black (despair, death, murder), white (purity), yellow (coward), red (anger). After a number of stamps of the right combination are collected, one can cash them in for a free murder, rage, binge, beating, or suicide. The purpose of a psychological campaign is to guide the direction of the collection to induce the target to act in a way that supports your aims.
The classic case this last year of this sort of self guided progression of the collection of imagined and imported brown stamps by Anton Brevik in his murder rampage in Norway. Super imposed on the Lucy Dump Chart, the motives are clear:
Brevik, a failure as a loner, takes on the victim role when he imagines the humiliation and degradation imposed on Norway by the Diverse, he switches himself to Rescuer by Prosecuting the despicable degenerate, and loathsome existential threat to the innocent helpless Norwegian people. The is the same mantra the Nazis used against the Jews, the Allies in WW2 used against the Axis, and the Bolsheviks did to the Imperialist Capitalist Exploiters of the Masses too dumb to do anything without the Nurturing NKVD. Recognize the pattern, you are seeing it now.
DECEPTION
Deception is at the heart of survival. The purpose of deception is to influence the behavior of others who are the dinner or diner, the date or the rival in favor of survival. The military focus on deception is what one wants the others in the fight to do. There is a lot of nonsense going about the latest fad in warfare, information warfare, the command of the narrative. That is a focus on the medium (sight and sound) rather that what the target audience is to do. The target' response his behavior, not what he thinks or believes, is the objective.
The differences in behaviors between the fight for dinner and/or the date while often death and destruction, may also be show and tell. There is a lot of overlap, particularly in human affairs as the human is rarely the Lunch. Given the survival of the gene pool, genome, or whatever word applies to the as yet undefined medium of communication outside of sight and sound.
Duck defends chicks against marauding Crows (Click for Flick)
The highest emotional drama in life, both animal and human, occurs when the Child is on a predator's menu. This is the Ultimate Survival Hot Button in the affairs of man and beast.
Given the seriousness of dinners and dates, certain Rules and Roles leverage either portrayal of the Blue (Heroic) or Red (Villainous) to the target. The first line of defense against predators is camouflage developed to fit a specific environment during the evolutionary process, or by manner of behavior/ The most serious of these is to induce fear into an enemy by evolutionary body development, or by carefully scripted threat displays or actual combat. Big eyes are an evolutionary favorite with rings around the eyes or like the peacock, the whole tail full of eyes. Animals don't like to be stared at, so the painted on stare is passively aggressive.
The threat display of snarling teeth, growling, and chest pounding are part of the use of the Body for social status.
The adaptation for getting dates, isn't really Deception, but product packaging to favor a natural selection. Animal markings that replicate the impact the uplift bra or Mercedes Benz often accentuate the positive with the appearance of a bigger head, broader shoulder or enlargement enhancement. Unlike the modern human female is the peacock, while in nature the female often is camouflaged to blend with the background.
The inherent deception found throughout nature can be decoded, in part, by application of the Laws of Inversity, first expounded by C. Northcote Parkinson whose books on Parkinson's Laws made such innovative management analyses easier
. "Parkinson's Law" could be generalized further still as: The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. An extension is often added to this, stating that: The reverse is not true.Of particular interest in cultural decoding is his Law of Triviality aka "Law of Inverse Relevance" aka "Bike Shedding":
The time spent debating an issue is inversely proportional to its objective importance. and;
The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
Regarding Deception, the Law of Inverse Attribution applies:
Always brag about your weakest virtue, and blame others with your biggest vice.George Orwell's concept of the antonymous DoubleThink and DoubleSpeak and described in his book "1984" and illustrated in Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia (based on his personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War) and expounded upon The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
Taken together will the unalterable Laws of the Universe such as Murphy's Laws and Haga's Law, the evidence (Why Nothing Works and No One Can Fix It, and the More We Try, the Worse It Gets) overwhelmingly supports the thesis that nothing is as simple as it seems to be.
THE RULES
Each group has it's own rules. What works in one group may not work in another. In nature, the extended family often is the primary group that has distinctly different signals by sound or display (sight). Such is the case of the Orca Killer Whales studied in British Columbia of the pods that hunt the salmon as the salmon ready for the return to their birth places.
The Rules applicable to any group, for reasons of simplicity as these subjects can get awfully complicated fast. fall into two categories: Social Status and the Physical World. Also for simplicity sake, given that when this is needed, there will be no PowerPoint when you need it, and you don't know what to look for. This handy guide is a gimmick, not a theory, and is based on your own pair of hands as training and analysis aides.
This is a sample for the Corleone - Soprano Family:
:Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli (click for flick)
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| The Badda Bing Club, just don't get in Guido's Face or your Fate an Fortune will be in the Ground |
Face is your own self perception in according with the authority of the group as the Fate. Fate can be laws, such as Pushtanwali in Afghanistan, the US Constitution, the Rights of Texans, or whatever you were told as a child. Fate is what you consider is the standard of beliefs, behaviors, values and norms. In the US we say that "family values and individual responsibility" are the key. In Africa and most of the rest of the world this is a ridiculous as it is one or the other. And Americans are considered selfish. What is not recognized by Americans or Foreigners is that Civic Values lead the pack.
These rules according to the Fate, may make you ashamed and infamous, The fortune is how you earn a living as each trade or craft has it's rules. It's difference between an engineer and a cavalryman, or between as city planner and an attorney.
The Seven Samurai Lived and Died per a Code of Honor (click for flick)
The physical world is where the interplay occurs, Time is a concept that differs widely in the world, some times being circular, no day any different than another. Distance (all 3D) includes interpersonal space (arm's length for Americans, elbow length for Arabs) and height above floor level in an office or presentation or throne room. Time and distance is speed. The ground restricts movement here and enhances it there, and ownership of higher ground is good for social status. What people do to it affects the infantry, the engineer, and the golfer. Body includes the normal feed and breed compendium, and arm and hand signals/
Feudal Japan had highly defined Rule and Roles or Death
Test Your Knowledge of Body Language (click)
Every culture has rules. These are where you look to find them out, or at least start asking the right questions. We are on the edge of concluding and inconclusive adventure in the Middle East (at least for now) because no one asked the right questions. The lead screw up is Osama bin Ladin.
