---
title: "Culture, Trauma, and Memetics"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 7
---

# Culture, Trauma, and Memetics {#top}

*The complete “Culture, Trauma, and Memetics” chapter of https://spiritual-rationality.org, as one markdown file — its index page followed by every page beneath it, in reading order. The whole book in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full.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}

- [Culture, Trauma, and Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics)
  - [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma)
  - [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma)
  - [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)

---

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

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

*In this chapter:*

"Trauma" as a concept in general, a common shape of model about its causal structure, as well as important heuristic signals of trauma in others:

- [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma)
- [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma)
- [Trauma Smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells)

*Memetics* as the basic mechanism of cultural transmission, and some on the interaction between culture and trauma:

- [Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics)
- [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture)

Culture and memes as often burdensome psychologically, and difficult to shake off:

- [Burdens of Meaning](#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning)

---

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

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

:::note[*Epistemic status: more like "my impression" rather than "established consensus"*]

This section is also largely under-cited, and flat empirical claims are mixed in with some inference on my part.

:::

The word 'trauma' is often contested politically, which I mostly want to sidestep. I'll explain first some context about the history of the word as I understand it, and then the cluster it's used to refer to in the psychiatry and therapy literatures. See also some context on [nebulosity](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md#nebulosity).

There are some messy ontological and methodological problems in trying to analyze trauma. In contemporary rhetoric, 'trauma' often stands as a [disguised query](/md/metaphysics/real.md#disguised-queries) for a question like "who deserves privileges and accommodations because they have suffered." More deeply, whatever notion of trauma we use relies on some assumptions about what constitutes pathology and harm. 

Broadly speaking, 'trauma' refers to persistent *pathological* changes to psychology and behavior that arise as a consequence of adverse experiences, as well as the experiences themselves. That is, despite the language of "post-traumatic *growth*," positive changes that arise from adverse experiences are regarded as quite different from what we would normally be inclined to call trauma, and are treated as desirable, and even sought out deliberately.

In this section and the next several following, I argue for a few claims, some basically orthodox/normative and some disputed but fairly common in the circles I run in:
- Trauma is [the result of](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) unmetabolized adverse experiences (though not all such result in trauma).
- There are many milder forms of trauma, and there's a broad swath of "[trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells)" that look like trauma.
- There's a smooth gradient between, on one end, the causal structures and symptoms of PTSD proper, and on the other a lot of things which constitute normative socialization [in many cultures](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture).

## Defining trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--defining-trauma}

'Trauma' in Greek literally means "wound," and is still used in that sense in physical medicine. My understanding is that all of the modern usage of the term in a psychological context comes through Freud, himself drawing from an earlier German psychiatrist who believed that "hysteria" was literally due to an injury to the uterus.

Because of the modern interface of medicine, law, and power, psychological trauma in contemporary discourse is often understood narrowly in terms of psychiatric diagnostic criteria. There's some substantial confusion here, because the model which the DSM (the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual in the U.S.) uses is explicitly meant to track clusters of symptoms that will likely be tractable to similar interventions, but not necessarily to track natural kinds, let alone sharply defined causal mechanisms.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm]

The criteria for PTSD approximately match the stereotyped image of victims of war, genocide, rape, etc. These involve, briefly: a. flashbacks, intrusive memories, or reactions to associated triggers, b. avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, c. persistent emotional distress, alienation, or anhedonia, and d. persistent emotional dysregulation, stress, and fear.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM] These may be attributed to acute intense disturbing experiences, or more chronic and sometimes less intense experiences.

<details>
<summary>More on diagnostic categories and criteria for trauma in contemporary diagnostic manuals</summary>

The DSM and the ICD (the International Classification of Diseases) use very similar definitions for PTSD, and have a very similar list of adjacent stress or trauma-related disorders. While I don't take these definitions as singularly authoritative, I think they're informative as models developed by people earnestly trying to describe and work with this domain, as well as carrying quite a lot of authority, for those who put stock in that.

The ICD (but not the DSM) also has an adjacent category known as *Complex* Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which involves the same criteria as PTSD, plus distinctly strong feelings of shame and worthlessness, and severe difficulty sustaining relationships.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD]

(Note also that therapy organizations which have been advocating for the diagnostic status of CPTSD believe that it's something like "responsible for" a large swath of very specific diagnostic categories in the DSM. IIRC the definition they use is different and less restrictive than the one in the ICD.)

Even in the ontologies of the DSM/ICD, there are several other categories of trauma-induced disorders with different symptoms, which are somewhat weirder and less stereotyped, eg. Reactive Attachment Disorder and Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder. Note again that the ontology of the DSM is constructed in order to identify clusters that will be amenable to similar sorts of treatments, often just on the basis of their overt symptoms, rather than necessarily in terms of their underlying causal structures.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm] The resolution at which psychiatric treatment is applied broadly speaking can't track the underlying causal structures, which might be unknown, highly multi-factored, or highly varied. The techniques of psychiatry are often very "try stuff and see what sticks."

</details>

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM]: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition*, pp. 271-280

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD]: World Health Organization, 2025. *International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision* (ICD-11). [6B41 Complex post traumatic stress disorder](https://icd.who.int/browse/2025-01/mms/en#585833559).

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm]: See Scott Siskind, 2020, [*Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics*](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/) on psychiatric criteria as defining arbitrary thresholds for continuous distributions, and on the goals and constraints of the DSM. See also Awais Aftab, 2025, [*You Aren't In The DSM*](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/you-arent-in-the-dsm) for context on the history of the DSM and the goals and constraints of its editors.

"Psychological" as opposed to *psychiatric* models often revolve around detailed inside-view theories of the causal factors responsible for dysfunction, which are empirically much weaker, and which psychiatry usually avoids.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker] Note also that "psychological" models are willing to use far more flexible admission criteria, rather than psychiatric models, whose diagnostic criteria are often defined in order to have thresholds at large magnitudes of impairment. This is to say that diagnostic criteria often have more to do with contingencies of the modern medical-legal-insurance context, rather than reflecting some sharp boundary in the domain.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker]: (This is sort of a simplification, my understanding is that psychiatric theory does include these kinds of sketchier inside-view models also, even if diagnostic manuals avoid them.)

In these slightly-less-orthodox models of psychopathology, trauma is regarded as an important causal factor in (and pretty straightfowardly correlated with) a variety of different disorders, eg. Anxiety and OCD.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying, "trauma is not resticted to just whatever the DSM says."

There's obviously then, a big question: within the broader category of "psychological changes that come as a result of adverse experiences," what intuitions can we appropriately apply from the more clear cut "trauma" of the diagnosable-PTSD sort, vs. milder and subtler kinds of changes, in particular re whether they are desirable, and whether they should be regarded as a kind of harm?

I'll refer to this question as "what should count as pathological?"

For now I'm going to leave this question up to the judgement of the reader. I'll try to just describe what's actually in the various reports, anecdata, and actual data, and I'll discuss next [a particular model](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), and then [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells). I'll discuss this question again partially vis a vis [introspection ](/md/practice/introspection.md) and ["healing" practices](/md/practice/healing.md) and in detail [near the end of the book](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md).

## Models, reports, and anecdata {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--models-reports-and-anecdata}

::nogloss

All of the components of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD (and I left out some detail) are reported in various combinations and severities due to adverse experiences. There's also a variety, both in the normative psychiatric models/ontologies and more "extensive" psychological models, of other kinds of "trauma-induced" pathologies that don't just look like PTSD. Some broad clusters here include exaggerated (to extremes) neuroticism, self-centeredness, neediness, etc.&mdash;basically ordinary, if undesirable, tendencies in human psychology in general. Again, there are milder forms reported that seem to be caused by traumatic experiences, which don't necessarily qualify by official criteria.

There are three important (non-exhaustive) clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature (note these are not quite standard terms):

::gloss[*Distortion*, *rigidity*, and *dissociation* are the three main clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature which I focus on.]{#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--trauma-clusters}

- **Distortion**: patterns of variously intense kinds of psychological "lopsidedness," dysfunction, or "distortion" which are claimed to result from abuse or neglect.
- **Rigidity**: an intense need to maintain one's behavior, appearance, or sustain positive regard from others in very specific ways, for fear of rejection or some projected memory of violence
- **Dissociation**: numbness, dissociation, and deficits in emotional development
  - (See more on the [phenomenology of dissociation](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#dissociation).)

Therapy manuals are rife with reports of these sorts of cases, of course aligned very nicely with the views of the given therapy modality or school. The stereotype of at least a modern genre of these stories usually goes something like, "I realized that my exaggerated, dysfunctional, neurotic behavior was the result of unresolved trauma. As a child [*and the stories are almost invariably about childhood trauma*] I learned those emotional and psychological patterns as a defense mechanism, but now I am able to heal that trauma."

I'm sort of uncertain quite how to take this evidence. It seems to me that schools of therapy often have dodgy epistemic standards, and my impression is that the best "evidence based" therapy actually doesn't work all that well, in the sense of producing robust recovery, etc. (I discuss this more [in an appendix](/md/appendix/therapy-efficacy.md).) One plausible model for what's going on here, which I like, is that the effectiveness of therapy is contingent on extreme levels of skill and intuition on the part of the therapist. This level of skill would be difficult to transmit, measure, and document carefully, leading to a pretty severe regression to the mean in each generation of some school of therapy. See [more on this subject](/md/spiritual-truth/schools-teachers-transmission.md). Nonetheless this is decent evidence against the accuracy of these models.

Still, my sense is that this broad shape is probably substantially right. Some evidence that contributes to my sense here:
- IIRC the correlation between eg. ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores and dysfunctional adult outcomes is pretty strong. Similarly, again IIRC, for other quantitative measures of the correlation between trauma and dysfunctional behavior.
- We have lots of quite tidy evidence about the structure of trauma responses in the extreme cases (actual PTSD), that traumatic psychological adaptations are something like "specific" and "structured," (as in, specific to the details of the trauma, and shaped in a way that reflects it) rather than resulting in someone being only diffusely disturbed.
  - It seems basically plausible that we shouldn't expect this to be specific to extreme cases, and while the evidence from therapists is sketchier and less robust, it still seems pretty substantial to me.
- This broad claim, that adaptations to traumas are structured with respect to the shape of the trauma, aligns with my own introspection and with introspective reports I take seriously.
  - Note that I think most introspection is mostly nonsense, see [more about introspection and confabulation](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md).

In the broader definitions used in the therapy literature, trauma is not just restricted to experiences of intense fear or horror, but also often of experiences of grief and mundane tragedy. Commonly reported as well are chronic, low to medium-grade experiences of alienation, rejection, humiliation, etc.

Reports of the dissociation cluster often come with healing stories, to stereotype, of discovering some great pit of fear, anger, sadness, etc., which the person reports they were "protected from" or which was "held at bay" by the previous dissociation. They then report "processing" those emotions, and recovering the ability to experience some greater breadth of emotions, body sensations otherwise, or of newfound ease and comfort with social interactions.

These reports also usually include variations on the some themes:
- Recollection or "discovery" of like, something in the genre of the breadth/depth of grief from some incident or chronic adverse experience, and of contortion of their psychology wrt this
  - Commonly, recollection of child abuse, long suppressed
- Recollection/discovery of unusual or proscribed proclivities, stereotypical stories here are from trans people, queer people more broadly, from the BDSM community, etc.
- Less commonly, discovery of "held" grief/fear/etc. around the location of a previous physical injury, chronic illness, or body part associated with past embarrassment or shame

(See more on such "[openings](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--opening).")

The broad thrust of these reports, both in the very modern modalities but also going back at least to Freud, is of discovering a lot of stuructured, highly "semantic" psychological content associated with gross psychological dysfunction or "offness", exagggeration, distortion, etc.

A similar cluster that's often reported includes patterns like tendencies towards hyperfocus or obsession, the apparent absence of normal desires or appreciations (this overlaps with dissociation), compulsive nonconformism, unusual superstitions, etc.

Again, this entire category of evidence is fraught. Many of these reports observe patterns similar to [culture-bound disorders](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) where people have experiences of neurosis, grief, etc. in line with very *specific* patterns in their culture, and often in accord with some changing zeitgeist of eg. Western therapy culture. Therapy reports are also problematic because they're heavily primed, even where a therapist is skilled and not setting a narrow frame, clients often come in with a particular image of what healing "should" look like, and will enact that. [I'll discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) my sense of what constitutes *real* or *trustworthy* introspection, though broadly this is pretty hard to justify in an "objective" way. Still, I think as a broad shape these are very real phenomena.

Introspective reports from solo-practitioners, meditators, etc., including anecdotes I've collected, overlap substantially with those from the therapy literature, but more varied and probably more dubious. Again I think these are *often* not trustworthy, but are an important source of evidence as well. Some of the weirder stuff here is also actually attested in the therapy literature, eg. encounters with demonic entities which entered one's psyche during a traumatic event, so-called "genital armoring," or experiences of accessing ancestral or past-life traumatic memories.

---

# The Structure of Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma}

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

:::note[*Epistemic status: speculative, with some meaningful evidence*]

:::

The image that one might get about trauma based only on the criteria for PTSD is that it's mainly about symptoms of emotional *dysregulation*. I think this is too narrow, especially for [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells). One view that I like says that trauma is something like an *exaggerated* and overly restrictive response to real fear, horror, and grief.

It seems like in general, mammals, at least, learn on a kind of "emotional" basis, as in, following gradients of valence and emotion. This often follows some thread of curiosity, satisfaction, or pleasure, or their opposites. This can be gentle and slight, or can also take the shape of abrupt reorientations in response to acute, intense valence, whether positive or negative. IIRC both of these are observed pretty straightforwardly in primates, dogs, rats, etc. Perhaps, some people are capable of learning in a "neutral," "technical," or "clinical" way from experiences that for others are strongly valenced, but descriptively this kind of emotional imprinting is how things usually go for most people, for experiences of extreme danger, joy, etc.

Organisms in general also need to be highly sample-efficient when it comes to danger: you don't get many chances to almost die, or almost lose your leg, and you want to *really* learn your lesson from near misses. Humans can also transmit various kinds of dangers culturally, besides the much slower and coarser transmission of genetically encoded instincts that lots of species have. Still, cultural transmission is generally pretty low-resolution compared to the full reality of some threat, and even if people have internalized that something is dangerous, when they actually suffer some harm they likely won't be "prepared" for it emotionally.

So then, each such event is a big deal, and often one both overcompensates, and does so on a way that becomes very difficult to roll back.

Besides this, there is also so-called "negative trauma," basically trauma that occurs due to the *absence* of some experience. The prototypical case here would be childhood neglect. Now, "neglect" usually correlates with, and often has a connotation of, other kinds of adverse experience, but there seems to be a real effect where a child's environment is not overtly abusive, but there's an absence of parental warmth and care which leads to both "pychodevelopmental atrophy" as well as patterns of negative emotion etc., that are more stereotypical of trauma.

## Blending with the view {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--blending-with-the-view}

Besides just for sample efficiency, updates about negatively valenced outcomes probably "ought" to influence our feelings and [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md). While spirituality has some bearing on this, under normal circumstances it's going to be something like "appropriate" to temper one's sense of rightness, comfort, and emotional safety with respect to the real circumstances in the world. Barring the far reaches of [spiritual attainment](/md/spiritual-truth/truth.md), if you know that your brother is suffering, or that you might lose your job, this probably should be integrated into your affective sense of the world. Again, descriptively, this is usually how things go.

There's a tendency for these emotional updates in response to traumatic experiences to get deeply ingrained in the default ways of seeing, often in ways that become all-but-invisible. Reports from meditators, who often have richer introspective access than most, often go something like, "yeah it just *felt* like the world is fundamentally horrible and unsafe, and that colored everything I saw and interacted with"&mdash;and many such variations. Again, these reports can come from eg. survivors of genocide, but also (and sometimes with similar language) from those who've experienced totally mundane personal tragedy, familial estrangement, etc. A very stereotyped example here would be eg. from victims of bullying over many years, who report that their experience of being low-status, shameful, etc. seemed to be simply "part of the world," or so much a part of the world that it was invisible until the burden sloughd off.

I'll refer this kind of phenomenon as cases where trauma is highly "*blended with the view*."

PTSD proper is partly also about when a person sort of keeps "triggering themselves," but that's less what I'm talking about here. There also seems to be something especially pernicious about negative valence, where it's self-sustaining in a way that positive valence generally isn't. Maybe, we can view [awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md) as an experience that's *so positive* that one never needs to feel bad again, but this at least isn't what happens to most people when they fall in love, or win the lottery, or whatever.

## Emotional/Psychological Metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--emotionalpsychological-metabolism}

Related to all of this is the concept of *metabolism*. For most kinds of negative experiences, and even sometimes for very intense ones, there's a variety of ways that the experience/emotions/"content" etc. can be [integrated](/md/practice/healing.md). Two tentative glosses on "integration" here might be: a. robustly and maturely understood, and weighed appropriately with respect to the rest of one's values, and b. no longer acting out a traumatized, injured response, having a mature relationship to the reality of some experience.

So, let's say, a child experiences a let-down and is utterly distraught about this, but with time comes to a more mature relationship with success and failure, at least in degrees. Not to make a blithe comparison, but probably the same is possible with respect to loss, safety, humiliation, etc. There are familiar stereotyped reports about "learning from" the loss of a loved one, of a kind of maturity and richness and flowering that comes from it, or through it, etc.

Part of the experience of metabolism, in the caricature both of childhood let-downs and of gut-wrenching grief, involves some intense emotionality, tears, "catharsis," etc. This accords with the reports I generally buy, whether anecdotes from joe-off-the-street, meditators, and from therapy manuals. It's salient here to note that adults, and stereotypically, especially men, often have lost this kind of catharsis as a regular feature of their lives. Perhaps, sometimes this can be because they're already "highly integrated" in this domain, but from my perspective this is an indicative trauma smell.

To be clear, a lot of what looks to me like "correct" or "robust" metabolism happens on its own, and is not necessarily loudly emotive at all. There's some cluster of evidence that trauma, and maybe especially "small-t" trauma has more to do with not feeling safe socially in a negative experience. I'll [discuss more](/md/wayfinding.md) about subtler and more unusual kinds of metabolism.

There are very common reports of low-grade chronic anxiety, malaise, ennui, and even gross psycho-social dysfunction "unraveling" directly causally due to intense catharsis. Just the same, reports of healing experiences from both "classical" and "small-t" trauma do often actually look pretty much like stereotypical cathartic metabolism as well. There are however reports of kinds of very advanced metabolism that are "rarified," and might be silent or invisible from the outside.

## "Correct" metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--correct-metabolism}

::nogloss

*See also some discussion of [correctness, in general](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md).*

This all leaves out what the "goal" or "resolution" or "end state" of metabolism ought to be. This turns out to be a larger question, which I discuss as it relates to [psychology](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md) broadly, [spiritual practice](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md) in particular, and [meaning/value](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md) in general later. I'll discuss here what some of the considerations are, as it informs what I consider to be trauma smells.

First, there exists real suffering, violence, and injustice, besides which at least mortality seems to be basically inviolable. Most people are by default only sort of *vaguely* aware of the reality of suffering that they haven't experienced, and it seems to be difficult not to come away disturbed from facing horrors up close. Even very "personal" trauma of humiliation and abuse might be less profoundly disturbing just to witness but is still quite distorting psychologically to actually receive.

It's obviously not sufficient to say "well, those who haven't experienced such suffering represent some kind of *truer* untraumatized state"&mdash;there's real suffering which such a person hasn't really updated on. It seems like we want some notion of "maturity" or "integration," something to the effect of "wisdom despite, or through, suffering." So the question is sort of, what does maturity look like, and what is "false" maturity? (Or perhaps, trauma is just a ratchet, and you can only be dirtied or injured by it.)

A traumatized person has in some sense a thesis about what is safe to do, think, or feel. Agnostic of whether this is "correct" or "appopriate," broadly speaking it's in any case an adaptation to some adverse experience. An integrated perspective has to meaningfully take into account the full reality of the adverse experience in the first place, and not just by "faking it" and trying to [say magic words](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) which are not *existentially real* for you, nor by [dissociating](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#dissociation), or by just ignoring the subject.

So again, mortality. As far as I can tell, you and I are both going to die. If you learn your death is imminent, just learning that will probably be quite intense and painful, but you ostensibly already know that's coming. Have you faced that? What would it mean to have faced it? There are lots of spiritual/existential perspectives about death which largely look [wrong](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md) to me. Again, I'll [discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/truth.md) what a "correct" perspective would have to include here.

---

# 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma) 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)&mdash;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](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma), 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--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&mdash;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](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--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!"&mdash;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](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma): 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) 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.