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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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_caspar_ wrote

Haven't read the quotes from the book but as someone that read Max Stirner I think that human nature is a spook considering that our brain has neuroplasticity.

I think you are spot on here. Elmo Feiten makes the same point, claiming Stirner was a proto-queer theorist of sorts (at least within the context of 1840s europe): "It is striking how closely this line of argumentation - the interface between gender as the truth of the self and the brain as the truth of the self — mirrors the situation today in which an unholy alliance between evolutionary psychology and neuro-determinism seeks to naturalize gender differences as fixed by evolution in the deep history of our species and manifested in male and female brains, our gendered essence rendered on the screen by the wonders of neuroimaging. In the 'so-called age of the brain', the brain has become firmly established as a cultural locus of the truth of the self......This turn from determinism to plasticity has opened up possibilities for emancipatory interventions that consider the plastic brain, as well as the discourses surrounding it, as a site of struggle against reactionary essentialisms."

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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_caspar_ wrote

I too found out about them and their ideas through lecture videos. definitely academic work, but some of the more interesting Ive come across lately.

Im still studying it more, but so far I dig what they call radical enactivism: a perceiving, imagining and remembering in which an organism subjectively enacts/co-creates its own world.

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JohannKasperSchmidt OP wrote (edited )

You have it all wrong. Evolutionary psychology and determinism isn't at all antithetical to LGBTQ. I also argue that neuroplasticity is actually harmful to LGBTQ people. Stirner was also arguably an advocate for determinism:

Indeed, “if human beings were as they should be, could be, if all human beings were rational, if all loved each other as brothers,” then it would be an Edenic life.[413] —Well, human beings are as they should be, as they can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Again, not more than they—can, than they have the capacity, the strength, to be. But this they actually are, because what they are not, they are not able to be; because to be able means—to actually be. One is capable of nothing that one actually is not; one is capable of doing nothing that one does not actually do. Could someone blinded by a cataract see? Oh yes, if he had the cataract successfully cut out. But now he can’t see, because he doesn’t see. Possibility and actuality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not do, as one does nothing that one cannot do.

Stirner believed that we are all unique. We are all determined by our unique properties. Most people are men and women, but some people aren't, and even the people who are men or women aren't the same; they just share the same property.

That paragraph that you just pasted fucking disgusts me as the exact opposite is true. Neuroplasticity is an extremely totalitarian position. Think back to the Soviet Union. They used propaganda to attempt to control the population, and turn them into identical worker units that serve society without questioning it. If people's brains were plastic, then this would have worked. But it didn't, thankfully, and it isn't in modern society clearly because we are on this forum and have rebelled against today's predominant ideologies. It is only because of our inherent rebellious nature that we are able to do this. Humans are a difficult species to control. Only by changing human nature away from what it naturally is can you achieve the goals that feminists and progressives want.

If people's brains were really plastic, then authority would have no problem controlling us. It is because of our wild, primitive nature that we cannot be controlled.

Progressives and feminists want to use socialization to make men nonviolent, and to make women "independent." Some feminists want to annihilate masculinity altogether. Just take a look at this article: https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-confronting-manhood-trump/

Obviously it won't work, except eventually, maybe it will. I have yet to read the book about xeno feminism, but from what I understand about it already they basically want to use technology to make men and women equal. By doing this, they would only be proving that men and women are not the same, and that only by using technology is it possible to create "equality" and "progress." Elon Musk already wants to put chips in people's brains (the neura link). The use cases for it that I remember are for disabled people, and people with anxiety and depression. It isn't hard to imagine that this sort of thing might eventually be used to change people away from how they naturally are. If this does end up happening, it will be justified by liberals based on "morality" and "justice."

Also, if people's brains were really plastic, then LGBTQ people wouldn't exist for really obvious reasons. It's because LGBTQ people are inherently like that that they are able to exist. If society really desperately wants everyone to be straight, then you'd think our "plastic brains" would all become straight, right? But obviously, that's not how it works.

Because we are all different, it is hard if not impossible to argue for a universal human nature. Neither of us think that we're all the same. I rest my case.

edit: said independent instead of equal edit2: forgot to say brains

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JohannKasperSchmidt OP wrote

Sounds like a strange way of victim blaming instead of system critique.

Nope. I should have pasted this quote as well:

"To deny that people have innate inclinations that can be undesirable or dysfunctional is equivalent to blaming the victim for their suffering.”

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