june 3 2025
it is hot today. it is summer. I think it's good that it's summer. At least here, summer is a time for relaxation and fun. Heat does a strange thing to people. It's kind of animalistic a bit. We're like hot dogs [sic]. We are all very abstracted from our being, our animalness (?) in favor of humanity and rationality and individuality. we are so medicalized, rationalized, little hands driving big cars, airplanes, brands, touchscreens. We forget sun feels good on our skin because we need it. We forget beauty is physical and the physical is beautiful. Why don't we love the sun and the grass as much as we should. Children get a pass from this for a little. They can play with grass or throw balls around, but we expect people to act a certain way when they're grown. much has been said of this of course, it is a common mode. "Why yes, how odd is it that us with our monkey brains drive cars and sing opera, oh haha" but its too surface. In casual discussion humanity is the antoynm (learn to spell bud) of cruelty. Our humanity puts us above the animals right, but that is cruel, not violent, but hierarchal. hierarchies (which I do not know how to spell) are inately cruel, but they are also very human. We are drawn to ranking and ordering, whether it is movies, or books, or celebrities. Who dresses the best. Who can jump the furthest.
do the olympics make people do sports more
or is there a shame in knowing your jump is worse, that you are lower in the jumping hierarchy. Maybe if you try, you can be better in the sales hierarchy, or the mathamatics hierarchy. I don't know. I don't even know what "innately human" means. either nothing is innate or all of it is. Maybe everything is just a series of bounces and calculations right. And in that case there is no difference between nature and nurture.
why are you writing this?
as a sociology student I have to buy into the hope that understanding human behavior in a societal or economic context will give us the nessesary tools to improve society. many people kind of deny that. They think that people are the way they are and individualizing them is the only way. This is a genius, he becomes rich. This is a criminal, he is jailed. This is a degenarate, he is killed. We as sociologists have to see why these people become that way from how other parts of society acted on them. This is a genius, he was rich and put in high quality well connected schools. This is a criminal, he was poor and was continuely reinforced into doing crime through the justice and policing systems. This is a degenarate, he was abused, beaten, bullied, and shunned as a child.
But if you trace it back far enough, thousands or millions or billions of years, you find that maybe the first group are right. Perhaps stuff like racism, or poverty, or sexism is sociological. But those societies were built from the cruelty of people long ago who did what they did for power and success. There is an innate terribleness, an original sin that created these horrible situations for people, and it's within all of us. When you scream at your kid or your wife, maybe you can trace that back to thousands of years ago, when another you cried in the snow at the sight of his mangled brother. We hope sociology, and maybe psychology or anthropology can fix this. maybe