Science of the SpiritS


Family

The unique parenting philosophy of the Arctic Sámi people

arctic tribe sami child reindeer
© Paadar ImagesA unique parenting style prepares children for life in the Arctic
For centuries, reindeer herders have used a unique parenting philosophy to prepare their children for survival in the Arctic. Here's what we can learn from them.

Every year in June or July, under the Arctic midnight sun, Sámi reindeer-herding families in northern Finland, Norway and Sweden come together for one of the biggest social events of the year: "earmarking", which involves marking the new reindeer calves to identify them.

On foot, in all-terrain vehicles and even helicopters, they gather the semi-wild reindeer from vast areas stretching out dozens of square kilometres. Even young children are expected to join in. The youngest boys and girls help catch the calves. From the age of about 10, they take their own earmarking knives, grab a calf, and mark both ears with a unique pattern of notches. Children receive their own personal earmark pattern at birth, and use it to mark their herds for the rest of their lives.

Among the Sámi, an indigenous people spread across the northernmost regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia's Kola Peninsula, children not only participate in herding work, but are also encouraged to act independently in most other areas of life. They have a say in deciding when to eat, when to sleep, and what to wear, even at temperatures of -30C (-22F). To outsiders, that independence can be surprising. Missionaries who visited the Arctic in the 18th Century and later, wrote in their diaries that it seemed like Sámi children could do whatever they liked, and that they lacked discipline altogether.

Wolf

From red flag to red line: What is the limit?

mean streets movie johnny boy mook
Johnny Boy being a mook.
Announcement: On May 3rd, we will have a special guest for our paid-subscriber Zoom meetup: Ilya Khotimsky, translator of Russian economist Mikhail Khazin's Recollections of the Future: Modern Economic Ideas. I wrote about his summary of the book here. If you want to the chance to ask Ilya about the book, and Khazin's economics, you know what to do!
I recently watched Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), in which Robert DeNiro plays a low-life psychopathic mafia parasite, Johnny Boy, who is coddled and protected by his friend Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, past the point where any sane person would've broken Johnny Boy's legs purely out of principle. For those who haven't seen the film and don't want to, here's the plot summary: low-level mobster doesn't pay his boss, doesn't do anything of substance for the next couple weeks, then gets shot in the neck after telling said boss to his face that he's a sucker who's easy to rip off, and no, he's not going to pay him. Charlie, the actual main character, repeatedly makes excuses for Johnny Boy, vouching for him, spotting him a few dollars here and there, and believing he can get him to get his act together. After Johnny Boy's final confrontation with their mutual boss, Charlie tries to get Johnny Boy out of town until things cool down. It's while making their getaway that Johnny Boy gets shot in the neck, flailing around like a stuck pig, and Charlie gets shot in the arm. Roll credits.

In media and in real life, we have all seen examples of wives, children, parents, and siblings stick by a relative after he is accused or convicted of a serious crime — or exposed for a noncriminal act that severely violates behavioral norms.

Wolf

A psychopath wouldn't hesitate to cause another global financial crisis - if there was something in it for them

corporate psychopath stock market finance business psychopathy
© Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
Would you want a psychopath looking after your pension? Or what about your shares? In a recent talk at the Cambridge Festival of Science, I spoke about the latest research relating to a psychopath's love of money, greed for power, and willingness to harm other people financially for personal gain.

Since I began researching corporate psychopaths and the global financial crisis, the idea of the financial psychopath, an employee in the financial sector acting ruthlessly, recklessly, greedily and selfishly with other people's money, has gained traction.

The theory won support because psychopaths are more commonly found in financial services than in other sectors. It has even been argued that up to 10% of employees in financial services could be psychopathic. That is to say they have no empathy, care for other people, conscience or regrets for any damage they do.

These traits make them ruthless in pursuit of their own agendas and entirely focused on self-promotion and self-advancement.

Comment:


Magic Wand

Handwriting Lights Up Your Brain - Here's How

Hand writing
Pick up a pen to activate neural pathways that might otherwise remain dormant.

Picture two brains: one buzzing with activity, connections firing across regions in a synchronized neural ballet. The other shows only scattered flickers of engagement — isolated islands of electrical activation.

Both belong to university students sitting in the same lecture trying to capture the same ideas. The difference between them isn't intelligence, attention span, or interest in the subject — but the tools in their hands.

One holds a trusty pen poised over lined paper, while the other's fingers hover over a laptop keyboard.

This neural contrast, shown in a study in Frontiers in Psychology, is just one piece of mounting evidence suggesting that our rush toward digital convenience may be coupled with significant cognitive costs. From neuroscience labs to classrooms, research comparing traditional and digital learning tools finds that pens are not quite yet old school.

Bizarro Earth

The NWO religion: How the woke postmodern "faith" glorifies evil

Satanic mob
© UnknownSatanic Mob
It's not as if it was ever a secret: The very core of the woke movement is fundamentally rooted in evil. The general definition of "evil" being a conscious act of deception and destruction, the deliberate victimization of others for the sake of personal power, pleasure and gain. When I try to imagine what a religion of evil might look like I consistently come back to the far-left woke movement along with its rabid mantras, agendas and self righteous narcissism.

The majority of human beings have an inherent sense of good and evil; we often refer to this condition as conscience or moral compass. The intuitive inner voice that guides us and warns us when we stray into "the dark side" is a product of archetypal knowledge - What psychologist Carl Jung described as a set of inborn complexes or symbols that tap into our deepest emotions and sense of identity. All our social interactions are in some way affected by these archetypes.

These ideas are universal, present in nearly every culture in every part of the world at every point in time in the world. Societies with zero social interaction and separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles all have these symbols and principles present in their mythology, academia and ideologies. The building blocks of everything from language, to mathematics to religion and morality are influenced by inherent psychological imprints present in our minds from the moment of birth.

Book

Meet the man who taught Russia to fear

Gogol
© Culture.ruNikolai Gogol (1809-1852)
How Nikolay Gogol invented Russian horror

Nikolay Gogol invented the horror story - or at least Russian horror. This statement might seem bold, but it's not far from the truth. As we celebrate his birthday this week, [Born March 20 (Old Calendar)/April1 1809] it's fitting to reflect on how his literary legacy shaped the genre in Russia.

The first work that inevitably springs to mind is Gogol's "Viy," along with its chilling Soviet adaptation. Let's set aside the questionable quality of the modern remake; I vividly remember a school tour to Mosfilm studios, where merely glimpsing the sets from the original film gave me goosebumps. But "Viy" is not only about witches, devils, or other folkloric creatures. Indeed, much of horror literature draws from such themes - from Hoffmann's unsettling tales of monsters and demons to the contemporary, predictable vampire stories. Folklore, after all, prepares us to confront death and the afterlife.

Comment:
The Wiki on Gogol states:
Many writers and critics have recognized Gogol's deep influence on Russian, Ukrainian and world literature. Gogol's influence was acknowledged by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor and others.[9][10] Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé said: "We all came out from under Gogol's Overcoat."
Some of the titles mentioned in the article, have been made into films, though mostly in Russian, for a list see this Wiki. If one searches the titel and then looks up video, it is possible to find some of them online. In general, the YouTube page that hosts the embedded video has many other Russian movies, though only some are with English subtitles.

See also:
Westerners don't understand Russia - Putin

The most featured authors on SOTT are Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn,
Why Dostoevsky is trending on TikTok
Five reasons why Dostoevsky is SO great
Attack of the nihilists: Did Dostoevsky's novel 'Demons' predict wokeism, Antifa and the gender-benders?
Dostoevsky's thoughtful critique of the Left - still relevant!
Ukraine Education Ministry removes Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and other Russia authors from curriculum
Solzhenitsyn and Suvorov: Is reading the "anti-Russian traitors" a good or bad idea?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Live not by lies
A World Split Apart: Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West
SOTT Focus: Revisiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Warnings to The West
'Altered beyond recognition': Looking back at Russian patriot Solzhenitsyn's return to his motherland on the 100th anniversary of his birth
Joseph Pearce: Putin and Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn praised Putin before his death
Flashback Is Putin rebuilding Russia according to Solzhenitsyn's design?
Solzhenitsyn and the struggle for Russia's soul
Best of the Web: Solzhenitsyn, Russia's soul and the elusive reset button with the West
A prophecy of pain: Prescient Solzhenitsyn foretold the future for Ukraine
Solzhenitsyn - Banned all over again
Leo Tolstoy, 100 Years Later

On the topic of horror movies:
Researcher finds watching 'bloodcurdling' horror movies really raises levels of clotting chemicals in the blood
Why do people love horror movies? They enjoy being scared


Arrow Up

Jesus' Face on a Potato

Pareidolia
© Off Guardian
You've all heard tales of the face of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Pope, or maybe even Trump, showing up on the surface of a potato, on a burnt piece of toast, or even a kumquat or some other odd fruit, implying their likeness.

Then, when you actually see such a manifestation, you wonder how in the hell anyone could mistake some weird burn mark, growth malformity, or whatnot for the face of any human, let alone Jesus, Mary, or Trump.

But there 'ya have it. People love to manufacture reality from non-reality. And they do this with little provocation. If the potato has some sort of malformation, it is easy enough to push that into looking like a nose, a mouth, a cheek, then voila, it's Jesus!! (or Trump!) They aren't lying when they tell you that is what they see. They honestly see it. They would stake their life on it.

Sometimes, you may see it, too. Especially if they explain it, "See how this part of the potato turns up, and this little black mark here makes that turn up look like a nose," "Oh yeah," you might say, "It does look like a nose." The more information you get about how the potato should look like something in particular, the more you are apt to believe it, and then see it the same way the person explaining it sees it.

Particularly if you like the person who first shows it to you. And most certainly if that person is in the "mainstream," or has a whole gaggle of folks around them who see Jesus' face on the potato as well.

All of us are familiar with the Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study, which consisted of "experiments by Solomon Asch designed to investigate how social pressure from a majority group could influence an individual to conform." These experiments have been referenced again and again in an effort to show what is probably happening in the world today.

The "group" that influences all others to see the world a particular way is the "mainstream" group — the massive group of people who swear by whatever narrative is being blabbed out by mainstream media. We, on the other side of this, continually wonder why the mainstream is consistently blabbering out untruths, lies and "non-facts."

Of course, the irony of all this is that the side believing the mainstream is saying that we are doing the same thing — following an alt-stream media that is blabbering lies, untruths, and "non-facts"!

Do you know how to tell the difference?

Bizarro Earth

Alexander Dugin and the Decline of the West

alexander Aleksandr Dugin Oswald spengler
Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and German polymath Oswald Spengler
We are rotting. But in the rot, something slithers. Oswald Spengler looked at Europe and saw an old woman, lips painted to hide the cracks. Alexander Dugin looks at the world and sees a battlefield, lines drawn in blood. Faustian man, the one who reaches beyond, the builder of cathedrals, the engineer of apocalypse — he built too much, reached too far, and now he drowns in the very ocean he sought to conquer. What is left? A new war, not just a war of nations, but of Being itself. The Fourth Political Theory does not weep for the West like Spengler does. It laughs. It sharpens its knife. It declares the old ideologies dead and shoves their corpses into the dirt. It calls for something new, something beyond liberalism, beyond communism, beyond fascism — a return, but not to tradition as a museum piece. Tradition as a weapon.

Spengler knew. He knew that civilizations, like men, grow old, grow weak, collapse under their own weight. But what happens when an old man refuses to die? Look at Europe: a continent in the final stages of consumption, wheezing out empty slogans about "democracy" and "human rights" while its cities burn and its borders dissolve. Faustian man, trapped in his own creation, unable to let go, clinging to the dream of eternal progress as it spirals into the void. But Dugin does not speak of decline; he speaks of war. Spengler's Age of the Caesars, not as a lament but as a prophecy. The great men will return, but they will not be European. Europe has forgotten how to breed conquerors. The new Caesars will come from elsewhere, from civilizations still young enough to believe in destiny.

Bizarro Earth

"The Politics of the Psyche": Part 3. The Dissident Right are the Party of Oedipal Man

the dissident right
.The Dissident Right are not "Woke Right."
"Being American, the neo-Freudians have no such conservative respect for culture; they are all too ready to tinker with its machinery of repression in the name of individual fulfillment."

— Rieff: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.

"The elites of the emergent culture--if they do not destroy themselves and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control--are being trained in terminologies that have only the most tenuous relation to any historic culture or its incorporative self-interpretations."

Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic
The Radical Progressive Party of Narcissus vs. The Dissident Right

In Part 1 and Part 2 of the Politics of the Psyche series, I outlined Lasch's use of psychoanalytic concepts as a way to describe the motivations and personality make-up of the political Left and Right and the rise of a third party — the party of Narcissus — which can be seen as the contemporary (and mainstream) progressive radical Left who control the Democratic party. In the wake of the election of Donald Trump in November, and the current vibe shift that has been noted by writers and political pundits towards a more masculine-oriented, heavy-handed, realpolitik political and traditional cultural ethos, a discourse has emerged online drawing attention to what has been labeled as the Woke Right (see also) or the Dissident Right.

Within this discourse, there is a strong concern that this emerging fringe group of mostly anonymous social media personalities go beyond an embrace of this strident, yet still benign vibe-shift towards a darker, more antisocial hyper-masculine, hyper-nationalistic, Christian-nationalist, and fascist orientation. It is argued that this 'darker' characterization is who the "Woke Right" are and that they reflect a mirror image of the Woke left in the context of the ultimate desire for authoritarian control via a rewriting of American history and the content of the (binding) narrative defining our national identity.

Wolf

The cost of ignorance: How gaps in understanding psychopathy endanger kids

The shining movie nicholson danny
© CopyrightJack and Danny Torrence in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)
Continuing Chapter 5 of Karen Mitchell's work

Parenting and Children

For many, direct exposure to the persistent predatory personality (PPP) starts early. Lobaczewski briefly mentions the personality-deforming effects of being raised by a psychopathic or character-disturbed parent. Not having any experience to the contrary, such children imbibe "pathological" material from a young age, instilling in them with various illusions about the world, maladaptive emotional responses, and twisted values.

Mitchell adds several of her own observations based on the responses from her study's participants. As one put it: "the children's needs are never put first. They [the predatory parents] always have control." Additionally, such parents "use their children to achieve their own goals."
This is rarely observable or visible, however, as [the parents] often invest substantial effort into appearing to be a 'good parent' and grooming others to believe they are committed to their children while engaging privately in behaviours that are abusive, manipulative, intimidating, controlling, harmful, and/or undermining the other parent to family and friends.