---
title: "Spiritual Rationality, part 4 of 9"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 5
---

# Spiritual Rationality, part 4 of 9 {#top}

*Part 4 of 9, complete edition — “Trauma Smells” through “Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-3.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-5.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

## Notation {#notation}

Source notation, not standard markdown:

- `::gloss[…]` — definition of the heading above it. Invisible on the site;
  it is the hover card for links to that heading. Read as a definition.
- `::gloss[…]{#id}` — defines a term holding its own anchor. `#id` is the
  link target; the block below is what it annotates.
- `::nogloss` — heading deliberately has no definition.
- `:::note[…]` / `:::info[…]` — callouts (MyST/Docusaurus admonitions).

Footnotes are GFM. Heading anchors are GitHub-style slugs, written out as
`{#id}` in the combined files.

## Contents {#contents}

- [Trauma Smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells)
- [Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics)
- [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture)
- [Burdens of Meaning](#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning)
- [Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice](#practice)

---

# Trauma Smells {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--`.*

I'll use the word "trauma smell" to refer to a big cluster of things which, well, *kinda smell like trauma*. The term is a (shallow) riff on a concept from software engineering. This term is helpful to refer to a lot of stuff that looks like trauma, but which is both uncertain in particular and also [nebulous](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md#nebulosity) in principle.

I've [already said](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md) that trauma is nebulous, but still I'll talk about some distinctions here.

At mininum, I probably want to reserve the word 'trauma' at least for phenomena that are caused by some experience, rather than due to something like underlying natural variation. It's then often unclear what we're actually looking at. There's quite a lot of variation which we still probably want to call "pathological," both in medicine outside of psychiatry, and in psychology/psychiatry. "Natural" variation and adverse experience also interact, of course.

For a lot of what I'll describe as trauma smells, these are ambiguous whether they're caused by adverse experiences, or "only" "due to" "natural variation." In any case, my regarding something as a trauma smell means that I believe that I have enough evidence more broadly to regard that phenomenon as *likely* caused by some adverse experience, even if it's not definitive in any given case.

More broadly for pathology, lots of nebulosity here. So, is aging pathological? Once again, see [disguised queries](/md/metaphysics/real.md#disguised-queries)—to a large extent this question is either unhelpful or irrelevant, but it's fine to say "well, this seems bad, and it has some causes, and it's preferable not to have it," and leave aside the [metaphysical question](/md/metaphysics/metaphysical-disagreement.md). In any case, re trauma smells, there's quite a lot of stuff that sure looks pathological, and which looks like it has its cause in adverse experience. Partly also, "trauma smells" doesn't quite rely on assumptions about the etiology, mostly I'm saying "here's a big cluster of things which smell bad, and which seem to be pretty common."

[As I said](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md), the word trauma often stands as a disguised query for "what deserves special privileges," but I'm not trying to make some rhetorical move by using the word here. That's part of why I'm using this silly word "trauma smells," and that's also why a lot of my friends often literally use the word 'stuff' rather than try to litigate this or that as trauma.

## Smells in particular (not exhaustive) {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--smells-in-particular-not-exhaustive}

::nogloss

First, two methodological points here. One, these are in general something like "heuristically informative," or maybe just only weak to moderate evidence. Partly they're also a useful cluster to be able to talk about, regardless of how strong of evidence they are for "trauma proper," or whatever. Secondly, these mostly come from vibes-level, "energetic" (see below) intuitions on my part; though not just mine, and I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding along at this section.

There are [three main clusters](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md#trauma-clusters) of traumatic symptoms and trauma smells, namely: distortion, rigidity, and dissociation. I'll weave in and out of talking about each of them.

One grouping of trauma smells, which cuts acoss the three clusters: how readily is a breadth of [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md) and of ways of being available to a person? What kinds of psychological factors and states do they have access to? What seems to be forbidden to them?

- Do they have access to a breadth of both positive and negative affect?
  - to ease and relaxation?
  - to dreams and hopes?
  - to excitement and exuberance?
  - to devotion and sacredness, agnostic of the source?
  - to love and intimacy? To sexual arousal?
  - to feel fear?
  - to feel anger?
- Do they find it okay/safe to behave in a full range?
  - to sing and dance?
  - to dream and to hope?
  - to *be* angry?
  - to be loud?
  - to be harsh and unkind?
  - to *show* fear?
  - to feel or show weakness?
  - to feel or show strength?

These are all very common and fairly indicative trauma smells.

Often when something is "forbidden" to a person, rather than them explicitly saying "oh I can't do that," "I mustn't do that," etc., they will encounter internal resistance when they incline towards some way of being, *or* they will find that domain of meaning blank, empty, irrelevant, or they'll say that they "never got it," "never experience that," etc.

There's at least some evidence of extreme positive affect within "natural variation," or more often extreme lack of negative affect, eg. those with the FAAH OUT mutation (leaving aside some nuances here, and maybe some conflicting evidence). There are of course lots of reports from mystical traditions of people having variously "conquered" or "purified" anxiety, anger, lust, etc. I'll [talk later](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md) about whether I think this is even good or desirable, agnostic of whether the reports are accurate. In any case, even in the 98th percentile case, if someone reports "I don't experience xyz," for things broadly in the list above, I think that's a moderate to strong trauma smell.

Adjacent to this, my intuition is that in general the full breadth of human meaning should something like "work," for most people. Again when some domain "doesn't work" for a person, that is, that they seem restricted in the breadth of meaning that they're able or willing to access, that's a trauma smell.

Sometimes this looks like a person having foreclosed that domain, regarding it as certain that it will only give rise to negative valence, or will certainly give rise to negative valence in the long term. Often this is not salient to the person themselves, and so it appears in their experience as again simply unavailable, blank, etc., rather than negatively valenced, without substantial [introspection](/md/practice/introspection.md) or [healing](/md/practice/healing.md) work.

In particular, commonly reported among meditators and [practitioners](/md/practice/spiritual-practice.md) otherwise are stories like, "I did lots of meditation for a while, and then discovered in some domain which had previously been unavailable, or which bothered other people but which didn't bother me, that I had some structure [obscuring](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md) it, and now I have access to that domain in a way that's rich and intense," whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Trauma smells can also sometimes be associated with positive valence and affect, in some different forms. This can both mean that positive valence specifically arises, but more saliently that a person experiences a need to present positive affect:

- Generically, "I must have positive affect," "I must be cheerful, positive, etc."
- Intense need for positive input in ways that seem out of whack. (distortion)
  - Intense need for approval
  - Intense need for reassurance
  - Intense and exaggerated sexual drive, so called "hypersexuality"
- Often, that a person feels a need to sustain effort to achieve some otherwise normal affect, relationship, etc.
- Demands/requirements for things about gender performance
  - This is obviously contentious. There's obviously some range of third-wave feminist views here which see gender in general as a widespread cultural trauma. I'm sympathetic to some substantial chunk of this take, though it's not clear how far it goes.
  - In any case this can be variously extreme, and the strongest versions feel like pretty clear trauma smells.
- Similarly demands for things about class or intelligence

One note re hypersexuality: to be clear, the baseline is that young people, and really people in general, are pretty fucking horny, and that both the desire for sex and especially the experience of sex are quite intense. Again, nebulous, but what I'm referring to is something like the extremes of "socio-sexuality."

In many of these cases, "must," self-demands, etc. don't necessarily mean that a person will insist that they must, if asked, which is a pretty transparent trauma smell. Often "must" (whether "must do" or "must not") can be experienced as "inconceivable," "impossible," or again unavailable or opaque. In a different but similar shape, a person might have some affect or way of seeing that's always "online," in a way that's insensitive to the external circumstances, whether positive or negative.

Additionally, a common shape of trauma smell takes the form of being unable to notice or learn from evidence that some behavior is not necessary, is ineffective for its nominal goal, or has negative consequences for others. Another form of this is being unable to notice that others do or don't hold one in positive regard, or that some plan or fantasy is unrealistic or impossible. Again this can be positive or negative. A common explanation for the cause of this sort of thing, which I mostly buy, is that these are due to a some tight knot of contraction with respect to an unresolved trauma, which has sort of "metastasized" into an object level goal or fantasy. Still, this shape is maybe moderately weak evidence of an "actual" underlying trauma, but is still an important kind of trauma smell.

### Briefly on energy signatures and vibe reads {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--briefly-on-energy-signatures-and-vibe-reads}

*See [much more](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy) on "energy," and more broadly on the somatic correlates of trauma smells, in a mostly metaphysically agnostic frame.*

In addition to overt and fairly legible qualities like the ones I described above, there's a broad class of trauma smells which are "energetic." *Energy* is among other things used to refer to (what I would regard as) the perceived quality of a person's emotional, psychological, and sometimes physiological state. Energy is also believed by many people to be something like ontologically distinct and stable, existing outside of perception. Energy is variously also regarded as being the perceptible reflection of a person's [somatic phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md). Again note that the more energy-credulous believe that the perception of energy is more like directly apprehending some pervasive energetic stratum.

I'll say seriously: if any of this turns you off, please read the page linked (both are to the same page) above.

Anyway, conditional on one agreeing that the relevant perception *occurs*, I think this is at minimum pretty useful analytically. One angle on this might be: we don't really have a robust ability to externally inspect a person's emotional/psychological state *except* through our naive mammalation (and I suppose specifically primate) emotional perception, and "energy" refers to the phenomenology of that sort of perception, agnostic of its ontological status.

FWIW some people claim to be able to do this sort of thing purely "analytically" but I'm somewhat skeptical, and I mostly expect these are post-hoc explanations on top of energetic perception. I'm still basically a materialist here, and I expect that whatever the perception is based on shows up on a camera, as indeed you can perceive someone's energy through video or photograph (or even voice recordings), but that the energetic gestalt is a much much richer intuition pump than all of the fine-grained movements, postural qualities, affective patterns, etc. that might be able to be described "objectively."

In addition, reports of energetic perception *of others* often line up pretty well with reports of internal perception of somatic phenomenology; separately this all lines up with my experience fairly nicely. There are pretty out there reports that I get into in the page linked above, which I mostly don't take very seriously.

For those who are sensitive to energy, there's commonly reported a variety of energy "signatures" correlated both with various clusters of trauma smells, as well as with officially diagnosable trauma.

Below are some energetic qualities which are common trauma smells: (not necesarily aligning nicely with the lists above)

- Fragility, frailty, or thinness
- Baseline fear and activation, also contriction or tightness in general
- Exaggerated, played up charisma, warmth, or humor
  - Note that sometimes this is a result of conscious deception, but sometimes it's more like an energetic contortion.
  - As a trauma smell, it's informative if there seems to be ease in their charisma, and conversely if there seems to be activation in that quality—some people are just flamboyant, gregarious, and charismatic, which is not by itself a trauma smell, imo.
- Resistance in a person's baseline energy, and especially in specific moods or relationships
  - Does their [system](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#bodymind-and-the-system) seem to be fighting itself?
- Ease that seems in contradiction with other qualities in their energy
  - Eg., "okayness that doesn't seem to be okay" or "relaxation that seems tight."
- Exaggerated social dominance or submission
- [Blockages](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#blockage) in general
   - This can look variously either like dissociation or blankness, *or* like contraction or contortion

Some energetic qualities which are sort of anti-trauma smells:
- Groundedness
- Robustness
- Richness, both of positive and negative valence, and both high and low activation

One important point to stress: negative valence, and energetic contraction *in the moment* are not really trauma smells at all. An important heuristic for me here would be something like, "does this seem to be a context-appropriate negative valenced response?" (agnostic of whether it's "healthy" or "adaptive") vs "does this seem to be a baseline part of their energy, and does it feel contorted or blocked?"

## What informs categorization as a trauma smell? {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--what-informs-categorization-as-a-trauma-smell}

So I'll repeat, much of this is intuitive, "on vibes," though informed by the reports and claims of many practitioners and teachers I've encountered or read. I'm personally definitely getting both false negatives and false positives, but I'm fairly confident in this broad shape.

In any case, more specifically my basic heuristic for inclusion is, "does this seem to correlate with undesirable consequences of adverse experiences?" and more specifically "does it smell like everything else I currently regard as trauma-like?"

The point here is not to say that "untraumatized" people are simply right, and have everything in order psychologically and spiritually. [There's real content](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md#correct-metabolism) that trauma relates to, which an un- or at least just less-traumatized person might be ignorant of, willfully or not. Nonetheless, looking at the broad patterns of variation and distortion present in known-to-be-traumatized people, it feels fairly straightforward to say, "hm, yes, this seems to be off, or wrong, from the way that a human mind an experience feels like it *ought* to be."

The claim here is also not that the median person in a given culture (or median worldwide? whatever that would mean?) is untraumatized, but just that comparing the median person to a variety of different sorts of traumatized people is informative about what sorts of effects trauma has, and what the directions of variation are that trauma leads to. Additionally, if you look at evidence from a culture that seems to carry a low [traumatic load](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture), and notice how that culture as a whole as well as its members individually are different from other cultures and their members, I think that's especially informative about what a relatively untraumatized psychology looks like.

### More on natural variation, "neurodivergence," and pathology {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--more-on-natural-variation-neurodivergence-and-pathology}

"Well, maybe they're just neurodivergent!"—so, I think first off there's better and worse versions of this take.

A lot of the "claim," or at least rhetorical stance of "neurodivergence" is that some kinds of pathologized psychological variation should be regarded as something like natural variation, and therefore not pathologized. Once again, see [disguised queries](/md/metaphysics/real.md#disguised-queries). Narrowly as a kind of rhetorical/discursive move, my response is 👎.

I think some versions of this take are fine, and some are nebulous, which is often absent from the discourse, and I'm mostly fine with this distinction in principle. Obvious examples here of things previously pathologized and now regarded as natural variation would be left-handedness or (with some holdouts still) homosexuality. Once again, nebulosity, blah blah, and I think this applies to eg. autism at least to some extent.

Still, this kind of discursive stance is trying to resolve the harmful [memetic](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) effects of pathologization, by mostly-arbitrarily defining some protected category out of pathology. Hence my 👎. I largely endorse destigmatization but I don't believe you can usefully determine pathology by fiat.

Now, I think a better question would be: *pathology* aside, how do you know if some psychological cluster is causally downstream of adverse experiences, vs. endogenous, and specifically maybe genetic? This is I think a much more interesting empirical question, and I don't have a great answer here.

On vibes: most of the pathologized "neurodivergence" correlates with enough of the psychological, behavioral, and phenomenological patterns of really-probably-actually-trauma, including also life histories of lots of adverse experiences! Additionally, there's some sparse introspective reports that some kinds of "neurodivergence" can be ~"healed."

---

# Memetics {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--`.*

A *meme* is a piece of cultural information, and memetics is their study. Memes include everything from written language, to manufacturing techniques, individual songs, and religious rituals.

Memes have properties that make them similar to organisms, in particular to a variety of species that require hosts. These include parasites, bacteria, viruses[^culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--viruses] and even technically mitochondria. Host-dependent organisms may be helpful, harmful, or benign for their hosts.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--viruses]: *Technically* not organisms.

Memes reproduce, mutate, and are selected like ordinary biological organisms, though through different mechanisms. Memes are also subject to different selective pressures from biological organisms. Memes, of course, will die out if they don't reproduce. A meme's fitness is determined, among other things, by its transmissibility, persistence, the effects that it has on its host, and by how it competes with other memes in its niche.

Memes live in, or run on, human minds. They feed off of mental and emotional energy, and they compete with other memes for attention, or "mindspace."

Many memes can coexist, both in a single human mind and in a larger culture, and often exist in a kind of ecology. A "memetic monoculture" would die very quickly, a human culture can't consist *singularly* of weaving baskets; people need a reasonably large collection of practices, skills, relationships, and institutions to survive. Memes often come in complexes or "memeplexes", perhaps comparable to "colonies" or "herds."

Below are some important kinds of memetic competition. Memes will starve or die out under various conditions:
- If they can't feed, meaning that their individual hosts stop practicing them or remembering them
  - eg., traditional crafts dying out, or secularism eroding religion
- If their lineal transmission is stifled, hampered, or forbidden
  - eg., children no longer wanting to learn a minority language, or a practice becoming illegal or taboo
- If they explicitly conflict with other memes
  - This can go different ways, and sometimes conflict can be energizing and sustaining.

<details>
<summary>Memetic survival and reproduction strategies</summary>

In particular, there are a number of strategies available to memes, like there are to biological host-dependent organisms:
- Gut microbiota are ~impossible to get rid of without modern antibiotics, and are *helpful* to the fitness of their hosts. They are usually transmitted by mothers to their children, and are about as resilient as their host populations are.
  - Memes like "shoes" or "agriculture" or "money" probably belong here.
- Some kinds of infectious agents are *endemic* within a host species. This can either mean that most members of the species are infected for most of their lives (like HSV-1, which >50% of adults have) or that the agent moves around a larger population, being eliminated by individual members but often returning, like the common cold.
  - The former is maybe comparable to superstitions, and the latter maybe some kinds of harmful dieting fads.
- Some kinds of infectious diseases often kill their hosts, but are highly transmissible, eg. bubonic plague, maybe less so COVID.
  - Probably suicidal terrorism isn't really an instance of this?

There are more possible examples, but I don't want to strain the metaphor too much. In any case, the reproduction strategies and lifecycles of memes are varied and often not comparable to infectious organisms at all.

One interesting parallel with biological reproduction and memetic reproduction mechanisms is lateral gene transmission. Bacteria (among others) can share genetic material "laterally", not just asexually but between two living members of different species. Memes, and especially memeplexes can integrate content from others, rather than by direct inheritance, eg. Doc Martens boots being created as a work boot and adopted as a punk fashion symbol, or traditional Western militaries integrating strategies from insurgency movements. Besides lateral transmission, memes have other interesting kinds of reproduction and evolution, eg. memeplexes can merge with others, like in syncretic religious traditions.

</details>

## Egregores {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--egregores}

The term *egregore* is used to refer to super-organisms or collective entities formed of many people. Egregores form when people see themselves and their community (understood broadly) as a cohesive identity, capable of collective action and needing protection. These can include religions, ethnic groups, corporations, social movements, etc. Egregores can often overlap with others, or might be contained completely within another larger one.

<details>
<summary>Egregores can be seen as eusocial memetic superorganisms</summary>

The metaphor here goes as follows: multicellular organisms contain separate cells with their own metabolic structures cooperating to form tissues, organs, and a larger organism. In particular, most individual cells are not gametes, and individually their direct lineage will end when the entire organism dies, regardless of if the organism successfully reproduced. Then, eusocial species (like bees) form large cooperative colonies where most individual members (workers) do not reproduce, even if the colony is successful and propagates.

Egregores are like eusocial colonies *of memes*, not composed exactly of the human hosts, but composed of memes and existing in the collective mind-space of humans. Similarly to cells and worker bees, the memes will shift around, die, and be replaced, even while the larger super-organism (the egregore) keeps going, surviving both all of the individual human hosts and the memetic cells.

cell:multicellular organism::eusocial individual:eusocial colony::meme:egregore

</details>

Egregores are mostly "immortal" (in the biological sense, technically "non-senescent"), and like individual memes they can reproduce "laterally," as well as merging with other egregores. They do sometimes experience mitosis, but they don't usually reproduce sexually.

Egregores having something of their own identity, and "want" to persist, often despite the consequences for their host members, eg. stereotypical harmful cults. Egregores can slough off both component memes, and sometimes hosts. Sometimes these are flushed out like dead cells, but egregores can actually use controlled cellular death to *strengthen* the larger organism&mdash;almost every religion has its martyrs.

In an extreme form of this, egregores can often "outlive" whatever nominal organizing principles they represented at the time of their founding. Very common and powerful egregores in modern times are those constructed in terms of some ideology or religion, but often those egregores can persist despite an almost complete change in the contents of the ideology, whether by hostile takeover or by drift. An egregore can also sometimes persist through a complete turnover of its human members.

Nonetheless, egregores are still usually at least moderately cooperative with their hosts, and many are quite positive. In any case the basic pattern seems to be necessary for human survival and reproduction, unlike mostly solitary species like bears or spiders.

It's important to note that egregores don't need a particularly "coherent" ideology to function, and likely in the ancestral environment, and still in some parts of the world, egregores were structured mostly around kinship and diffuse communal recognition, without need for an ideology to justify them. A lot of the content and structure of ideologies has more to do with sustaining an egregore than being particularly adaptive beyond the functioning of the egregore, let alone "right" or "true." A particular shape of society often has some kind of homeostatic property to persist in that shape, among other things because on average it has been selected for having such properties, with those that weren't having died out.

## For better and for worse {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--for-better-and-for-worse}

Broadly speaking, both memes and egregores are selected for (as in, differentially survive and reproduce) having properties that do not need to be closely aligned with our values personally or communally. In the metaphor: smallpox could persist for millenia despite being an obvious drag on productivity and wellbeing, but remained endemic until the development of modern vaccinology.

More specifically, because memes and egregores "live in" or "run on" human minds, they can leverage all sorts of patterns of belief and feeling to justify and protect themselves. These justifications neither need to be aligned with the effects of those memes on their hosts, nor again even be "true" or coherent. In particular, often the contents of a [metaphysical system](/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md), or individual metaphysical claims, are part of the buttresses and defense mechanisms of memes and egregores.

*The fitness or persistance of a meme does not necessarily have much to do with its wholesomeness or helpfulness for its human hosts.*

A meme, memeplex, or egregore can't be *too* toxic for its hosts, lest it die off with them, but like many endemic infections it can be a major burden on the health and wellbeing of the host species while still allowing them to carry on. Sometimes this kind of burden can be seen as a kind of "excess" or "miscalibration", but often the toxic effects of infectious agents are part and parcel of their reproductive strategy (both for biological organisms and memetic ones).

Memetic agents can use a variety of tactics to promote transmission, and to "feed". These are mostly built on normal human social/emotional intuitions:
- Anger and hatred, whether directed at an individual person, a hated group, etc.
- Shame, in many forms: original sin, sexual shame, hygiene, economic- and class-based (in either direction), etc. etc.
- Anxiety and urgency, both re specific outcomes, but often just diffusely
- Personal pride
- Group loyalty, whether ethnic, religious, national, etc.
- Loyalty and devotion to the Good, righteousness, etc.
- Devotion to God or deference to the sacred
- Protectiveness and care for privileged groups or symbols: "women and children," "under-privileged groups," etc.
- Personal and collective responsibility
- Taboo, disgust, or peevishness

Briefly, some illustrative shapes of powerful memeplexes that I observe in the current culture:
- A large memetic cluster around work productivity, ambition, achievement, and "impact"
- Several competing memeplexes around sexuality
  - Some of these deploy shame, and some deploy shame-upon-shame, as in "it is shameful to shame others for their sexuality"
- Climate doomerism
  - This often deploys both personal shame and responsibility (eg. food waste, or fast fashion, re the climate crisis), hatred of those who are seen as perpetuating ecological destruction, etc.

Note that the claim here is neither that memes and memeplexes are *wrong* in principle, just for being memes and having memetic properties, nor that they are harmful just because they are memes. Indeed, lots of memes are both highly fit and basically positive.

Rather, I want to point out *that* these are memes, which are transmitted in a population *by means of their memetic properties*.

I think that impulses like patriotism can often be prosocial, but more often are harnessed by systems of power, and are used to foster enmity and conflict. Similarly, devotion, familial love and responsibility, Justice&mdash;all of these are honorable impulses but are *also* major "disease vectors" for harmful memes.

I'm harping on the harmful aspects because they're more salient, especially in the contemporary memetic ecosystem. Broadly speaking I want to communicate a perspective like, "memes that you may identify with or hold dear are not *necessarily* doing you good, and noticing their *construction* as memes can let you see them more clearly, determine what ways of seeing and being are healthier and more wholesome and robust."

On egregores more specifically, one important pattern is that egregores as organisms "feed" off of, or are made stronger by conflict with other egregores. As an egregore becomes less salient, it starves and dies, but when its members are riled up, their loyalty, care, and urgency with respect to the memes that make up the egregore are strengthened.

Some salient examples of this kind of process are the countless religious and ethnic conflicts in history, which are often extremely costly for both groups, but which certaintly strengthen the egregores involved! Often these are between groups that from a distance seem extremely similar, eg. the Hutu and Tutsi, or Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

### Cursed {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--cursed}

Some memes and memeplexes have shapes which I call *cursed*.

Cursedness often involves some pattern in which a person is "trapped" by a meme: eg. that they're threatened by some terrible (often symbolic) outcome, that a memeplex or community is the only source of truth or goodness, or that the person's values, autonomy, or discernment are undermined or dismissed.

More pernicious examples often trap people's perspective in a narrow view, without needing some extreme thread of apocalypse, eternal damnation, etc. Eg., pathologization can often "trap" neurotic or [traumatized](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md) feelings as "wrong" or "not real," denying such a person from *really* investigating, feeling, and [unraveling](/md/practice/healing.md) them.

Conversely, sometimes views which try to *contradict* cursed memes sort of "have the meme inside of them" too. Eg. body positivity often has a kernel of fatphobia inside of it, such that the fat-hatred and fat-shame has to be *covered over*, rather than resolved or healed. (I discuss patterns like this [much more](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md) later.) Body positivity often also has to deny the real health consequences of obesity, and so altogether ends up carrying a crumpled, distorted version of the cursedness *of* fatphobia inside of it.

---

# Culture, Taboo, and Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/culture — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/culture.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-culture--`.*

Human cultures in general transmit [memetic](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) packets to their members, including patterns which might be called [traumatic](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md), or which at least [*smell* like trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells).

First, regarding the term *cultural trauma*: I often find this term distasteful, and it's especially often deployed politically by factions I dislike, and to make arguments I don't endorse. For anyone reading who has similar reflexes, I'd ask that you assume I'm trying to be precise, and making do with a word that's *good enough* for a moderately subtle concept.

In the extremes, most people are basically sympathetic to a notion of a diseased and traumatized culture which is able to perpetuate itself, the example par excellence perhaps being endemic patterns of violence (and very saliently, sexual violence) in prisons. Not to try to generalize inappropriately from that case, I think that there are many patterns of (less extreme) cultural trauma which are pervasive in extant cultures.

There are three main clusters here that I'll discuss:

- **Taboo** as a highly general pattern, and often functioning as a kind of "cultural traumatic payload"
- **Adaptation** to traumatic environmental conditions
- **Self-traumatization**, that is, of a culture upon its members

## Three main clusters {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--three-main-clusters}

### Taboo and superstition {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--taboo-and-superstition}

::nogloss

I'll use the word *taboo* to refer to a broad cluster of patterns in human cultures which I suspect rely on the same or overlapping psychological mechanisms. This includes a lot of what might be included as norms, superstitions, or sometimes generically just "cultural practices."

Taboo in this sense forms a kind of primal human social technology, which provides a distributed mechanism to "succinctly" communicate information about low probability negative events. In some modern theories, taboo is seen as a low-resolution cultural pattern which encodes knowledge about danger or risk, but perhaps distorted or [over-reified](/md/metaphysics/reification.md). Salient examples here might be taboos against incest, or different kinds of taboos around cleanliness, feces, etc.

Let's say: human children come with very little knowledge, and our species is specifically adapted for long childhoods rich with learning. Children are both vulnerable and quickly become capable of exposing themselves to risk that outstrips their understanding of the world. There's often a steep tradeoff between capability/curiosity/intelligence on one hand, and sensitivity to risk on the other. In a species like ours, cultures need to be able to transmit *densely* the risk associated with various strategies or behaviors, and in a general way which can be applied to a wide range of dangers in the environment.

(Note that people feel that children and especially adolescents are too risk-taking, and this is somewhat true but it's not quite what I'm talking about&mdash;I mean things like, small children don't yet understand that stoves or knives or busy streets are dangerous.)

Under such a regime, the packets communicating different kinds of dangers have to a. *strongly* convey some danger, even at risk of exaggerating it, b. be very likely to be kept and transmitted to the next generation, and c. be understood by both children and unsophisticated adults. The tendency then is for such packets to be very simple, sharp, and often indeed to be exaggerated over time.

Note the claim here is not "taboo is meaningless and only harmful" but rather just, "taboo looks to be the mechanism of a very low-entropy communication system, both very valuable, but often resulting in goofy or problematic output."

Broadly speaking, there are many systems of taboo (as understood above) which have shapes in common with what I've referred to as [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells): sub-clinical patterns of behavior, perception, and experience which *appear* to be caused by unmetabolized adverse experiences. Some examples:

- Taboos against sexual contact between young people, or contact at all between the sexes
- Taboos against emotional expression, eg. weakness, fear, sadness, etc., and especially crying
- Taboos against specific words or specific kinds of expression (loudness, anger, etc.)
- Taboos against specific foods, or specific rules about when food becomes impure
- Taboos against specific eye contact patterns (eg. avoiding direct gaze with authority figures)
- Sexual shame, body-shame, taboos against nudity, etc.
- Menstruation taboos, virginity/purity taboos
- Taboos around feces that regard it as disgusting or shameful to be heard to fart, or especially to be seen defecating
- Perhaps, face and honor as reified constructs

To be clear, there are structurally pretty similar patterns which are functional, and there's lots of overlap between functional and "superstitious" patterns. I'm sympathetic to theories that these are something like "holdovers" or "overreaches" from functional patterns in a given time or place, compare with eg. proscriptions against drinking cold (ie., unboiled, disease-ridden) water.

Relatedly, this still runs into the same questions I discussed in [the section on trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells), that identifying something as traumatic is nebulous and ambiguous, because indeed lots of things are dangerous or harmful and *should* be avoided. For what it's worth, there are spiritual traditions which see even eg. taboos around feces as a kind of burden, ignorance, or confusion, and some hypermodern western schools with similar spins on taboo in general.

### Adaptation to exogenous conditions {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--adaptation-to-exogenous-conditions}

Premodern agriculture probably fits nicely as a mostly exogenous social configuration which would have been traumatic for its members: people often went hungry or at least under-nourished for substantial portions of the year, they lived in fear of bad harvests and famine, and they were conscripted into an intensity and monotony of labor that excluded most of the breadth of human flourishing.

Two caveats: obviously such societies were *practicing* agriculture, and so this isn't quite an exogenous cause, but generally agricultural societies couldn't really just choose to move to another form of economy. Also, some of the burden of premechanized agriculture would have been due to theft and waste by feudal elites, but my impression is that wasn't quite *most* of the problem.

Depending on how we draw the boundary of "one" society, another relatively exogenous pattern might be equilibria of violence between groups. This might include retaliatory personal violence like blood feuds, but also recurring war, as has been endemic in our species for at least thousands of years. In the epicenters of wars, we can probably reasonably assume clinical levels of trauma in all parts of society. Both direct exposure to violence, and the threat of violent disruption to one's livelihood, of one's land being taken as spoils, etc., should likely have been traumatic for most people. Such societies are likely to [reify](/md/metaphysics/reification.md) eg. martial virtue or submission to violent cultural imposition like forced religious conversion.

One more: coal mining communities adapt to the unhealthy and unsafe conditions that men working in mines are subject to, and to their likely early deaths, whether from collapses, explosions, or black lung. This affects both the psychologies of actual miners, but also their families and the communities as a whole, who understand that at least the lives of men will likely be harsh and short. Similarly, such communities will likely reify this as good or at least unavoidable.

### Self-traumatization {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--self-traumatization}

"Exogenous" above is nebulous but at least worth contrasting with relatively more "endogenous" patterns, which are much more like *culturally specific* and *contingent*.

On the far end, the prototypical cases would probably be Female Genital Mutilation and Chinese foot binding. The basic shape here is that a society something like "actively" embodies a pattern which traumatizes its members, and especially that they see this as good, desirable, virtuous, etc. My understanding is that adult women saw[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--saw] these practices as good, so it's not quite *simply* a matter of eg. men directly and knowingly subjugating women.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--saw]: Re FGM, still, *see*.

These are some of the most extreme cases, but I'm more interested in the less glaring ones. Broadly speaking I'm interested in circumstances where normative socialization in a culture involves techniques, experiences, etc. that we would at a personal level call "abuse" or "neglect" and whose effects parallel those of [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) when observed at a personal level. I'm especially interested in contexts where that's still the case in our culture today.

It's salient here to look at changing cultural standards of abuse over time. Restricting it to American culture, as recently as 70 years ago it was commonplace to hit children, and *my sense*(?) is that it was more common to verbally abuse children, to compel them with threat of force to all kinds of activities, etc.

I don't have definitive evidence here, but it should be at minimum *plausible* to say, "well, when people are subject to these experiences as individuals, at least in our modern culture, on average they get trauma or at least subclinical trauma-like effects, so it's reasonable to suppose that those effects should also apply when people in a culture as a whole have them, and vice versa for the absence of those experiences."

On vibes, collected anecdotes, and based on some sparse data I've seen, if you look at cultures that are more openly abusive by contemporary Western standards, they indeed look more traumatized by the criteria I describe as trauma smells! The most salient example to me here is East Asian culture (very broadly), which seems pretty obviously more dissociated and rigid than Western culture, on average.

(Obviously, aggregating over large and diverse groups, etc., but the point still stands, assuming my sense is correct. Also, [see below](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--weird-developmental-psychology-otherwise) re my take on cross-anthropological considerations for this question.)

There are theories which suggest that trauma is less about the specific content of an adverse experience, as much as rejection and isolation in that experience. In these theories, having a traumatic but *normative* socialization results in better outcomes on average than trauma *while isolated*, which is very often reported in Western clinical psychology. I think this is probably moderately true, but I still think my claim is broadly correct, that classically traumatic adverse experiences, when practiced by a culture in general, result in trauma smells.

Besides patterns of overt *abuse*, I'm especially interested in ways that cultures transmit baseline trauma-smelly affective and relational stances. In particular: a. there are patterns of basic affective/dispositional transmission, and b. there are patterns of social shaming, rejection, and exclusion which can be extremely steep, enough that I'm inclined to refer to them as a kind of cultural trauma.

#### Affective cultural transmission {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--affective-cultural-transmission}

Cultures seem to be able to transmit, besides specific practices and institutions, also (in the aggregate) baseline affect and disposition. Eg., high social trust, optimism or pessimism, tendency towards depression and neuroticism, conscientiousness, or availability of intimacy and vulnerability. In the subtlest cases I'm not mostly inclined to call this trauma, but the more intense cases have pretty characteristic trauma smells. In addition, while not really trauma smells, baseline optimism, felt-social-safety, etc. obviously contribute to some broader skewedness of a given culture, on average.

Some obvious extreme cases here would be eg. patterns of pessimism and neuroticism among Ashkenazi Jews, Puritan theology of original sin and suspicion of pleasure, and pervasive fear and self-censorship in the former Soviet Union.

Even more relevant here are patterns of [negative trauma](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md): trauma incurred in the *absence* of a developmentally "necessary" input, eg. parental warmth and affection, safety, play, etc. Again on vibes, collected anecdotes, and some sparse data, there seem to be in the aggregate broad cultural patterns of atrophy or at least diminished sensitivity to a variety of ways of being, in culturally distinctive shapes.

#### Shame and social rejection patterns {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--shame-and-social-rejection-patterns}

Firstly, my sense is that there's a basic fear of social rejection in humans, which in productive cases leads to conformity and prosociality, and in more neurotic cases leads to anxiety and paranoia. Sometimes people will argue that this is a kind of "fundamental human trauma"&mdash;I'm open to this perspective but that's not quite what I'm getting at here.

Beyond that kind of baseline prosocial conformism, some cultures have constructed patterns of intense shame and rejection. In extreme cases, this can incentivize and valorize suicide or intra-familial murder, ie. *Seppuku* and honor killing, to restore honor. It feels to me... mostly unreasonable to even have to defend a position that this is a kind of cultural trauma. More specifically, I want to say that the culture (and therefore its members) carry a traumatic and exaggerated fear of, *and* inclination for, social rejection.

Another angle on this pattern would be eg. (relatively) high rates of suicide in elite schools, attributed to stress and overwork, and both fear of, and actual academic failure. Again it feels reasonable to assume that the differential rates of suicide signal an underlying hightened fear of failure and rejection in that cohort as whole, which is an indicative trauma smell.

Again here there are much less extreme cases which are more interesting. Even if they don't lead to murder or suicide, there are patterns in many cultures of greatly elevated inclination for, and fear of, social rejection, and associated patterns of anxiety and rigidity. My sense is broadly that a. the propensity of a society to deploy shame and rejection, b. the intensity of conformism and social rigidity, and c. corresponding trauma smells, are all fairly strongly correlated. Examples that come to mind are the modern culture of Korea, elite society in Britain historically and perhaps still, or stereotypically, modern American corporate culture.

## WEIRD, developmental psychology otherwise {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--weird-developmental-psychology-otherwise}

::nogloss

So there's an obvious critique of this perspective, that a. in principle this is culturally *chauvanist* or maybe "myopic" (prioritizing culturally specific notions of health and especially "spiritual health") and b. more specifically that results from Western psychology don't generalize outside of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies.

I think this critique is basically correct as far as it goes, but I still stand by my schtick as mostly directionally correct, and pointing to a real cluster.

Re a., my perspective is certaintly different from lots of traditional and culturally specific conceptions of "spiritual health," and it's at least partially aligned with the contemporary liberal zeitgeist, but I don't feel like I'm aping the Western dogma here.

More interestingly re b.: it sure *seems like* the basic [shape of trauma](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md) in general happens across all human cultures, though some seem to be either more susceptible to it or (more sympathetically) at least more *forthcoming* about it. Obviously, different cultures relate to and cope with their cultural trauma differently, and it also seems like cultures can express and *foster* neurotic and traumatized patterns in very specific ways. See later on [culture-bound disorders](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md).

Again, the specifics matter: my claim here is moderately sparse, namely that there seems to be cultural trauma in broad strokes, but is mostly agnostic with respect to any specific psychological model, like popular schticks based on developmental psychology, or especially "childhood developmental trauma" as the source of most of abnormal psychology. 

(It seems like the exciting claims of developmental psychology mostly haven't been borne out in the data[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--harris] even for Western culture, and almost certainly not cross-anthropologically.[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--lancy] I'll add that I still think that something in the direction of negative trauma should apply in general across human cultures, and I would be very surprised if this were actually *just* a cultural pattern.)

[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--harris]: Judith Rich Harris, 2009. *The Nurture Assumption*

[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--lancy]: David F. Lancy, 2014. *The Anthropology of Childhood*

I'm less clear if trauma smells all line up, and I expect those to be more culturally specific. Still, based on my understanding I'm quite confident that there have to be behavioral and [energetic](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy) consequences of trauma etc., and my depiction of "trauma smells" basically just tries to gesticulate at a bunch of clusters of those.

---

# Burdens of Meaning {#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/burdens-of-meaning — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/burdens-of-meaning.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--`.*

:::note[*Epistemic status: riffing, partially vibes based, but seems very real to me.*]

:::

Meanings and views can be harmful or at least burdensome to those receiving them. People, overwhelmingly in my circles, but perhaps very broadly in modern culture, are carrying a bewildering tangle of competing views, motivations, and felt responsibilities.

[Memes](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) are subject to selection pressures which are decorrelated with human flourishing and spiritual integrity. Cultures can become diseased, and perpetuate their disease indefinitely, or carry harmful patterns which are only partially functional. That said, it's not clear what "functional patterns" would mean in this context, in particular, there are many configurations of culture which are functional in the sense that they stably perpetuate a relatively robust society, even if they are needlessly costly to their members, or otherwise spiritually corrupted. 

Indeed, this is part of the question which this book poses: what patterns, practices, and views are oriented towards truly wholesome and spiritually upright lives and cultures?

Sometimes these harmful patterns are deeply structural, but some are relatively coincidental, and decay or fizzle out given enough time, or contact with another culture. Eg., many cultures have beliefs about cleanliness re food, excrement, or especially sex and menstruation which are lost relatively rapidly upon contact with western norms (though often displaced by other harmful norms about cleanliness from western culture.) Often cultural contact stresses many of the basic patterns of social organization, so very saliently there are often major changes in the structure of family, economy, and political power during periods of intense cultural contact, both, yes, in the context of western colonialism[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--colonization] but also otherwise.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--colonization]: Western colonialism is obviously extremely relevant to this discussion, and in many casess anthropologists and historians have had to do a lot of work to try to reconstruct what pre-colonial cultures were like, but this shape seems to be true of many other phases of contact in human history.

[Spiritual practice](/md/practice/spiritual-practice.md), especially in styles adjacent to the trauma-healing-and-personal-growth memeplex, often has a very intense relationship with this dynamic. Sometimes practice and community are seen as explicitly oriented toward cultural change (whether insular or global), and very often they're seen as oriented towards personal freedom from dysfunctional, harmful, or spiritually depraved patterns culturally. These have various antecedents historically across cultures, and even the "shedding the insanity of the default culture" schtick seems to have been present well before the modern period, saliently in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra.[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra] [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra-not-healing]

[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra-not-healing]: Though, in a very different frame from the modern hippy one.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra]: Not to be confused with Western Neo-Tantra, see [this footnote](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md#fn-neo-tantra).

Practices and systems of belief which are meant to be comforting and liberating often transmit a memetic packet of very mixed spiritual integrity, at least from my perspective, and in general pairwise between most perspectives and any other. Often these are some coincidental hodgepodge which happens to have been reified by the tradition, but often the helpful and harmful qualities are interlocking, or two sides of one coin. Eg., many traditions of faith and devotion can provide both clarity of purpose and a relaxation of fear and anxiety, *in the same motion* as infantilizing their members and diminishing their capacity to think critically and with autonomy.[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--devotion] Similarly, views meant to inspire discipline, rigor, and uprightness often use patterns of shame and internal self-abuse to achieve them, resulting in an obvious kind of [lopsidedness](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) among their practitioners. 

[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--devotion]: Some people would disagree with this example at least in principle, and believe that faith, surrender, and devotion are possible with no epistemic content whatsoever.

Worse, from my perspective, many memes explicitly intended to be empowering or healing on net mostly just tangle a person further, rather than assisting them in untangling thoroughly. (I discuss this dynamic in [much more detail](/md/wayfinding.md) in a later chapter.)

Memes don't necessarily form a coherent ecosystem. This is both because a culture's collection of memes isn't particularly well optimized, even in very small traditional cultures, and because in the modern memetic environment our minds are the competitive battlegrounds for many egregores and orphaned memes, which are not selected for being cooperative with one another *inside* of their hosts. 

So, people end up with an incoherent mess of beliefs and feelings which are often tugging in every direction, and which may not admit any clear way to synthesize across them, to try to become sane, etc. 

Many cultures have something to the effect of a "memetic immune system," which can help keep the roiling mess in check. However, most such immune systems, besides being only partially effective, are basically just conservative&mdash;the point here being that they are structured to protect the existing equilibrum, and are not oriented towards truth, wholesomeness, [integration](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--integration), etc. I discuss what I see as a desirable goal for practice [in a later chapter](/md/spiritual-truth.md) as well.

By default however, with the weak and incomplete kinds of immune systems that most people learn, one ends up vulnerable to infectious agents which implant desires, prescriptions, and anxieties, without concern for their effects on their hosts or the hosts' communities. (Keep in mind of course that memes, like viruses, are incapable of malevolence, which of course doesn't render them harmless.)

There's a kind of sensitivity and care that's possible here, which, *I'll claim*, it's good to cultivate in interacting with others. While I think *information* per se is much more neutral (eg. just learning that a perspective exists, etc.), in general my stance is to try to track what the effects will be on a given person of some memetic packet I might send, and to try to be careful to what their goals and constraints are, even interacting casually. 

I want to mark this claim explicitly, and I strongly endorse that you, dear reader, should do your own discernment here. To be clear, both this whole section and really the whole book are in some ways an intense memetic object, but, hopefully, they're oriented towards helping people unravel, and empowering their autonomy and discernment, on the whole.

---

# Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice {#practice}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice — also at `/md/practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice--`.*

*In this chapter:*

"Spiritual" practice in broad strokes, and some important related phenomenology:
- [Spiritual Practice](/md/practice/spiritual-practice.md)
- [Somatic Phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md)
- [🔨 Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices](/md/practice/practices.md)

Meditation, introspection, and healing, each intertwined and often laden as concepts:
- [Meditation](/md/practice/meditation.md)
- [Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")](/md/practice/introspection.md)
- [Content, Healing, and Integration](/md/practice/healing.md)
    - [🔨 Criticizing Somatics-and-Trauma Models](/md/practice/healing/criticizing-trauma.md)
    - [🔨 Other Models of Healing](/md/practice/healing/other-models.md)
    
*Awakening*, mysticism, and "the spiritual path":
- [Mysticism and Awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md)
- [🔨 Paths and "The Path"](/md/practice/paths.md)

Lastly, contextualizing transformative practice in modern secular culture more broadly:
- [🔨 Transformative Practice](/md/practice/transformative-practice.md)