Linked in previous, worth a reprint.
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In the last few years the public and scientific understanding of human temperament has been recovering from the grotesquely false egalitarian / chemical mindset of the 20th century.
From NYTimes last month:
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But the Zoloft ad’s insinuation aside, it’s also possible the young woman is “just shy,” or introverted — traits our society disfavors. One way we manifest this bias is by encouraging perfectly healthy shy people to see themselves as ill.
This does us all a grave disservice, because shyness and introversion — or more precisely, the careful, sensitive temperament from which both often spring — are not just normal. They are valuable. And they may be essential to the survival of our species.
Theoretically, shyness and social anxiety disorder are easily distinguishable. But a blurry line divides the two. Imagine that the woman in the ad enjoys a steady paycheck, a strong marriage and a small circle of close friends — a good life by most measures — except that she avoids a needed** promotion because she’s nervous about leading meetings. She often criticizes herself for feeling too shy to speak up.
What do you think now? Is she ill, or does she simply need** public-speaking training? Before 1980, this would have seemed a strange question. Social anxiety disorder did not officially exist until it appeared in that year’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual … It was not widely known until the 1990s, when pharmaceutical companies received FDA approval to treat social anxiety with SSRI’s and poured tens of millions of dollars into advertising its existence.
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As usual the subject used to be understood correctly and normally, then got distorted by the medical conspiracy between leftists and Big Pharma. Now we’re taking back the lost territory … and even using the old correct concept of temperaments to explore new areas.
This study is extremely interesting, and leads to all sorts of speculations about the Grand Blueprint of DNA.
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Personality and the ability to make difficult choices seem like human characteristics, but other animals had them long before we came along. Even the beadlet anemone can boast these traits, and it doesn’t even have a brain. Yet individual anemones have distinct personalities, and they can make decisions in a remarkably nuanced way. Briffa headed out to the south-west coast of the UK and found colonies of beadlet anemones living in the tidal zone. He decided to look at one aspect of their behaviour: how they respond to threats. He threatened 65 anemones by squirting them with a jet of sea water from a syringe. In response they retracted their tentacles, closing the hole on their top surface that serves as both mouth and anus. Briffa measured how long they stayed that way before reopening. Each anemone was tested three times over the course of a fortnight. Briffa found individuals were highly consistent, even when he factored out differences in water temperature, which slightly affected their behaviour.
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Goes on to explain that some anemones are consistently shy, tending to stay withdrawn for a longer time, while others are quicker to extend their tentacles. Beadlet anemones have no brain or central ganglion, just a simple nerve net. And they aren’t divided into boys and girls; they reproduce solely by budding. Thus the presumed sources of behavioral difference in higher animals (“Social Constructs” and “testosterone poisoning”) are absent. Also, the presumed Darwinian ‘purpose’ of variations, to create more genetic diversity, is meaningless here because reproduction is not sexual.
Sitters and rovers are clearly an intrinsic and universal part of the original design.
It’s interesting that the NYTimes author evinces a biased misunderstanding of introverts even while discussing a biased misunderstanding of introverts. Nobody “needs” a promotion. Rovers feel a compulsion to move up the status ladder, sitters don’t. If the lady in the Zoloft ad is a real sitter, she’s probably content in her current niche, probably understands that a promotion would lead to discomfort.
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In 2011 I was hopefully seeing a return to the earlier correct notions. I was way too optimistic. The alliance of Deepstate and Big Pharma has regained the whole world through the “intervention” of imaginary witch “viruses”.
Polistra's Mill 