Posted: Feb 27, 2010 12:39 am
You speculated above that a "TB person might’ve been a temperamentally sensitive child raised in a hostile, authoritarian, punishment oriented home". Growing up in my family we often had intense debates that would sometimes last through the night and into morning. This included adults and even extended family members as a group. Yet never was there a single incidence of hostility. Certain outside people who observed this would get very uncomfortable, and couldn't imagine how we could say such things to each other without fights breaking out, though we were having fun.
My observation as the years passed was that some of the people most uncomfortable with this was also the ones most prone to TB. Even some who could join the debate effectively seemed to get exasperated at not getting certain tenants accepted in the process, and the least capable of mirroring alternative viewpoints to access content.
The point here is that, knowing the family relationships here, it doesn't seem to me to correlate that strongly with the environment. Though such environments can push these predispositions around quiet a bit the precepts appear to remain pretty stable. Here is a video showing some research on moral values:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
It's formated in the context of liberal vs conservative but is applicable in a wider contextual range. This disposition toward authority articulated in that video seems to me to be more predictive of TB than family history. One very striking memory I have as a kid is when I learned that someone, with essentially the same upbringing as mine, was shocked at a very fundamental level to learn that certain teachers in school weren't very bright. They were after all an authority. For me, even in kindergarten, this seemed too fundamentally obvious to even think about. Yet this person has a much higher IQ than I do.
So I think tagging the hostility and/or authoritarianism of the family home is not that productive a predictor of TB. The same can exist on both sides of the fence in entirely non-religious ways. The sixties was born out of a highly authoritarian social structure, just following the McCarthy years. That correlates (not necessarily causation) with a predictor in direct opposition to the authoritarian thesis. The same could be said about the Reagan/Bush conservatism as a response to the liberalization, only to swing back with Obama in response to Bush Jr. Ever looked at the murder rate spike in the sixties? In my view we gravitate toward or away from a predisposition to TB in opposition to the moral dilemmas we face, not toward predispositions consonant with our moral dilemmas. Yet as a group we have a spectrum of predefined predispositions in our tolerance for chaos.
This goes beyond my main point, but I think our predispositions are related to this video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
My observation as the years passed was that some of the people most uncomfortable with this was also the ones most prone to TB. Even some who could join the debate effectively seemed to get exasperated at not getting certain tenants accepted in the process, and the least capable of mirroring alternative viewpoints to access content.
The point here is that, knowing the family relationships here, it doesn't seem to me to correlate that strongly with the environment. Though such environments can push these predispositions around quiet a bit the precepts appear to remain pretty stable. Here is a video showing some research on moral values:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
It's formated in the context of liberal vs conservative but is applicable in a wider contextual range. This disposition toward authority articulated in that video seems to me to be more predictive of TB than family history. One very striking memory I have as a kid is when I learned that someone, with essentially the same upbringing as mine, was shocked at a very fundamental level to learn that certain teachers in school weren't very bright. They were after all an authority. For me, even in kindergarten, this seemed too fundamentally obvious to even think about. Yet this person has a much higher IQ than I do.
So I think tagging the hostility and/or authoritarianism of the family home is not that productive a predictor of TB. The same can exist on both sides of the fence in entirely non-religious ways. The sixties was born out of a highly authoritarian social structure, just following the McCarthy years. That correlates (not necessarily causation) with a predictor in direct opposition to the authoritarian thesis. The same could be said about the Reagan/Bush conservatism as a response to the liberalization, only to swing back with Obama in response to Bush Jr. Ever looked at the murder rate spike in the sixties? In my view we gravitate toward or away from a predisposition to TB in opposition to the moral dilemmas we face, not toward predispositions consonant with our moral dilemmas. Yet as a group we have a spectrum of predefined predispositions in our tolerance for chaos.
This goes beyond my main point, but I think our predispositions are related to this video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html