Is the inner mammal method progressive?

No. Here are 5 reasons why.

People often presume that my work is “progressive” because they associate evolution with being pro-animal and anti-Christian. Here’s why I think it is not “progressive.”

1. I don’t embrace any ideology. I follow the facts where they lead, even when they conflict with other world views. Progressives are quick to condemn work that conflicts with their world view, so I stopped trying to win the approval of progressives and took early retirement.

2. Animal behavior is not progressive much of the time, so you have to ignore huge chunks of reality if you filter facts through a progressive lens. I explain what’s filtered out for each happy chemical below. Progressives do not openly say they are trying to prove that animals act like good socialists, but the “studies” reported in the internet age always fit that template. Before the internet age, there was plenty of evidence of animals acting in unprogressive ways.

3. Progressives blame unhappiness on “the system,” so their path to happiness is to “change the system.” They urge you to find meaning by joining in the fight against their “enemies.” And they idealize the happiness of other cultures, because that fits the presumption that “our society is the problem.” In my opinion, this promotes hate, as well as self-hate, and leaves you feeling powerless except when you’re following a progressive herd.

4. Progressives ignore our common humanity by dividing the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” They blame oppressors for all unhappiness, so if you identify as “oppressed,” you are not responsible for anything that happens to you. They rage at “oppressors,” which further motivates you to define yourself as oppressed. In my opinion, this is not a good path to mental health, and in fact has done much harm.

5. Progressives do not want you to be happy because they are recruiting for an “army of discontent.” Persuading you that your life is miserable has been the explicit strategy of the progressive movement since Karl Marx laid it out 150 years ago. Progressive leaders claim to seek power for your sake, but when they get power, it benefits leaders and hurts the average person.

“Progressive” vs. inner mammal view of happy chemicals

Dopamine

Progressives condemn self-interest as a sin of capitalism, so they have trouble acknowledging that dopamine makes you feel good when you meet your own needs. I am not saying we should focus on self-interest. I am saying that we should know the facts instead of filtering them through a 19th-century ideology. You enjoy helping others when your brain sees that it promotes your survival, but the fact remains that your brain sees the world with your needs in the center.

Progressives talk about dopamine in narrow silos to protect themselves from career-ending violations of the progressive agenda. Within each silo, they arrange facts in ways that advance the agenda. For example, they link dopamine to addiction in a way that supports blaming society for addictions. They believe that corporations can control your dopamine, but they don’t believe that you can control your dopamine.

The current academic approach to dopamine is to assert that it causes “wanting but not liking.” This leads to the conclusion that addicts do not get pleasure from their addiction. I have no problem with that, but then they jump to the conclusion that the cause of addiction is the pain of being stigmatized as a pleasure-seeker when you’re really just self-medicating. I think this is a semantics game that researchers play so they can appear to observe the progressive dictate that it’s always society’s fault. I have not particpated in this semantics game. That makes me an evil stigmatizer in the view of progressives.

Serotonin

Academics do not acknowledge that serotonin rewards one-up moments (except for Jordan Peterson, and he just cites a lobster study.)  Progressives do not acknowlege that everyone seeks social dominance. That would violate the core belief that oppressors are guilty, and oppressed people only do things because they’re oppressed. This is fundamental attribution error writ large.

Serotonin got a lot of attention with the emergence of anti-depressants. Fifty years ago, researchers began looking for the function of serotonin in animals. At that time, there was already fifty years of field biology demonstrating dominance behavior in animals. And fifty years before that, anthropologists were studying social dominance in hunter-gatherer tribes. Inconvenient evidence accumulated, and conflicted with the academic belief that nature is harmonious and “our society” is the source of all conflict. So this research has simply been ignored

Academics can see that their work will be ignored if they acknowledge that our brain rewards social dominance with a good feeling. They can see that their colleagues are applauded as geniuses when they advance the progressive agenda. So it’s not surprising that academics mostly report “findings” of “pro-social behavior” in animals and tribal people. And when they talk about serotonin, they ignore its core function and address it as a laundry list of medical processes removed from any natural purpose. Taking a hot bath has become the approved path to serotonin because the truth is too hot to handle. More on this in my new book, Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop.

Oxytocin 

Progressives see oxytocin as the “pro-social” chemical. This misrepresents reality, in my opinion. A gazelle does not serve the greater good when it runs toward the herd to escape a predator. On the contrary, it endangers others to save itself. Gazelles spend their lives pushing toward the center of the herd where it’s safer from predators. They end up on the edges when they’re too old and weak to push. In short, herds are not evidence of altruism and empathy.  The urge to belong to a group is inherently selfish. It helps your own survival. In the human world, being a good group member helps you survive because our brain anticipates future consequences. Progressives are promoting their own survival when they tell you that joining them will make you happy.

Cortisol 

Academic explanations of cortisol routinely imply that “our society is the problem.” The implication is always that stress will disappear after we “change the system.”

Conclusion

I want to keep this post to a reasonable length, but there are still many other ways that the inner mammal method violates the progressive agenda. The most important is my assertion that you are wired by your own past experience. This seems obvious, but you never hear it from academia. (They allude to it with the misleading term “gene expression” because it’s too dangerous to say openly.) When you see the match between your present responses and your earlier experience, it’s harder to blame society for everything that happens to you.

Why Believe Me?

You may be wondering where my information comes and why should you believe it. My next post explains my sources of information and insight. After that, I will write about the therapy-industrial complex and its power over your life.