We're creatures of Instincts — and we're shaped and guided every day by the interaction between the world we live in and all of the instincts that are embedded at multiple levels in our minds and in the thought processes that steer our lives.
We have instincts to be territorial, tribal, and loyal to our groups who we identify as being us — and we feel high levels of attachment, support, and protective concern about those people and those sets of realities in our world.
Every single actual living species has deeply embedded instincts that run, channel, direct, steer, and guide their lives. Other species don't invent behavior from scratch for the interactions they have with the world they live in. The survival of every species depends on them interacting with the world in the instinctive context that gives them support for the functional realities of their lives and gives it to them in effective and relevant ways that fit the situational needs of each species.
Bees have massive and extensive patterns of instincts that are relevant to each set and subset of bees and have them survive and even thrive in each setting they're in.
Bees do some fairly elaborate dances that teach and tell other bees in their hive where they should fly to find the exact food opportunities that are available in that setting. Those instinctive dances steer the other bees to the sites that will give that set of bees the supplies and nourishment they need to survive in that setting.
Each and every species has those sorts of instinctive tools embedded in them.
Wolf packs have very strong sets of instinctive behaviors that help them find food and then interact with each other in effective and relevant ways in the hunting process to create survival levels and achieve supplies of food that are needed for each group of wolves to exist.
Wolf packs also have strong instincts to mate, to create baby wolves, and to set up cultures within each pack to determine which wolves in each pack are alpha wolves, beta wolve, and even levels of theta wolves as the young wolves survive and grow into the adult population that helps their species survive in each setting.
We humans can recognize and relate to some of the instinctive behavior patterns that are soft wired into the wolves.
We also mate, have our own kinds of cubs, our own territorial turf battles and definitions, and we have alpha and beta instincts that can create their own kinds of interactions and aspirations with us in each setting.
The patterns are consistent and easy to see in most settings where we live as a species today.
Being Us and Them is a powerful and impactful instinctive behavior that we need to see, appreciate, and understand for all of our settings because it has such a huge impact on our lives when it is activated.
We instinctively divide the world into Us and Them — and we tend to have very different feelings about people we see and identify in each of those categories in every setting.
We tend to feel protective of our Us and of our We group in each setting — and we tend to have negative, hostile, and often angry feelings toward whomever we believe in a setting is an actual Them.
The patterns that trigger Us-Them behaviors are consistent and powerful in their impact on our lives in every setting where we live.
Wolf packs identify other wolves as their own kind of Them and they're sometimes willing to fight to the death to damage Them or to remove Them from a setting or turf. That behavior obviously feels very right to the wolves involved.
We tend to want to damage Them in our settings and we tend to suspend conscience and ethical beliefs relative to Them because we feel it's so right to support our Us that the ethics and the morality standards we usually apply to Us are often completely irrelevant relative to Them.
That's a very common pattern of behavior across the planet in almost all of our settings.
There are more than 125 ethnic conflicts going on in the world today, and all of those conflicts trigger that set of behaviors and beliefs and have people shedding blood and doing damage to each other with a sense that those behaviors are the right things to do.
It’s easy to see as soon as you learn to see it.
Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Syria all have groups of people today who speak a different tribal language from each other who are killing people who speak the other language, and who are feeling very justified in their behavior.
Our news media is breathtakingly incompetent, incorrect, inept, inadequate, incomplete, intellectually underpowered, and very inaccurate in their ability and in their understanding, knowing, perceiving, and seeing that all of those conflicts in all of those settings are tribal at their core and then explaining that tribal reality to their readers and to their viewers and then explaining why and how that tribal reality is true in all of those settings.
The media tends to write about those huge numbers of very clear conflicts in all of those settings as if they were each somehow situational and even ideological or political, and they ignore the obvious and easily discernable and confirmable reality that the people killing other people in those settings are killing people with a different language, a different culture, and a different identity as a group — and there’s nothing relevantly political in those settings because the people identified in each of those settings as Kurds or Tibetan or Alawites can’t convert politically to becoming English or Irish, or to become some other tribe by relabeling themselves in the field in each setting with that other tribal name.
Gaza has more than 40 million dead people today and they all have a different tribal identity than the people who are dropping the bombs on them there.
Gaza is a tribal war.
Ukraine has people who speak the Ukrainian language who are killing people whose tribal languages and ancestral tribal linkages have always been Russian, and the people on both sides in that war are feeling no guilt because they perceive the people they're killing to be Them.
Ukraine is a tribal war.
Both of those settings have tribal instincts in full gear in very visible ways today and anyone who knows about tribes killing tribes based on those instincts can see what is happening there to each set of people with accuracy and clarity because those tribal alignments are so clear for all of those people.
It's very instinctive behavior.
People kill other people and discriminate against others who activate and trigger that set of instincts that we activate in every setting where they feel like they're the right belief by the people in that setting about the other people in that setting.
Chechnya and the Alawites of Syria, and the Kurds of Turkey all have people with those tribal differences who are doing damage to each other today and who are feeling completely legitimate in whatever damage they do, because their instincts tell them the other group is a Them and not an Us.
We know what that behavior looks like in our own country.
We have a rich history in our country of activating those instincts and those behaviors at multiple levels and then doing damage to other people with those instincts in gear.
Our instincts have led us very easily down those paths in a number of relevant and highly visible ways for most of our history.
Slavery was a prime example of part of our activation history in our country for that set of instincts.
We enslaved people as a group for a couple of centuries.
We've also done massive ethnic cleansing and even somewhat genocidal behaviors against the original inhabitants of this geographical space with those sets of dehumanizing instincts guiding our thoughts and behaviors relative to those sets of people.
Us-Them behavior relative to the original native American indigenous people of our continent couldn't have been more obvious, and it was too often both destructive and damaging to the people in all of those settings.
White was an Us at an important and highly functional level for much of our history.
People here who weren't perceived instinctively to be part of the White European American tribe that controlled the government were damaged at many levels as we evolved as a country into the context we're in now.
The good news is — we're now on better paths for a wide range of those behaviors, and we should be able to achieve a more enlightened and very positive, peaceful, and successful future if we understand exactly how those sets of instincts work and then channel them to create a collective Us based on our core beliefs and enlightened values instead of being defined only by our race or our tribe.
We've had a recent period of relatively enlightened behavior in our country, and we should build on that enlightenment going forward from here as a nation to create a future that gives us all a chance for collective positive outcomes and shared success.
We need to create a country that believes in inclusion for all our people and that aspires and commits to win-win behaviors for everyone who is here.
We should recognize how badly we've done in some areas up to now.
The White Tribe Took Control for Centuries Here
In this country, we've always discriminated in various ways against anyone who doesn't look like the original invading European tribe that took control of the land and who then did partial and targeted ethnic cleansing against the native tribes who lived here before the invasion.
That group that started the national trajectory we are on now looked ethnically White with very light skin colors for the group and shared language that created a collective sense of us for that population.
White Europeans were the primary functional Us group who created this nation as a political entity. The original Native American people who lived here by the tens of millions as the first settlers on these continents actually had a long history of being warriors against the other original tribes, and those original tribes didn’t form any effective coalitions or alliances against the invaders from Europe because of those historic animosities between tribes here caused them to be enemies to each other rather than allies when that invasion from Europe happened.
Their functional resistance to the invasion by the European tribes was hampered and weakened hugely by having millions of people dying from the diseases brought here by the Europeans. Villages that had hundreds of thousands of people living in them in the years before the Europeans arrived were wiped out entirely by those diseases and that made settling many areas of the country relatively easy for the invaders.
White Europeans took over the continent and they created the new set of identities and rules for local behavior. They had a mixed impact on the process — and we ended up with some very good trajectories for many of the things we wanted to do as Americans from that white tribal identity and reality.
We were blessed as a nation by having some of the most enlightened people on the planet who were living in this country as white invaders taking control of the process at a key point in time and then creating our declarations of independence and then building our constitution to build an accountable and enlightened governing process for us as a people.
That governance process and that governing group was very white at the beginning of that trajectory.
The people in control of that process were very European and very tribal relative to the other people who lived here, but they were politically enlightened in some ways at the same time and that enlightenment for those sets of people gave us a framework that was probably more progressive and positive in many political aspects than anything else that had happened historically anywhere on the planet up to that time.
They made a collective decision to use English as the functional and governing language for the northern continent and that decision eliminated many of the conflicts and identity issues that would have happened if they had retained the original tribal languages of Europe for all of those people.
Canada got almost to that point and they decided to keep two languages instead of pulling back to just one — and those two groups of Canadians tend to be in constant conflict, because we can see on every continent on the planet that we have tribal instincts with different languages and each group with a language has people whose emotional energy gets focused on somehow preserving their language as a key priority for the group.
We avoided those issues by making English the common language everywhere, but we created a wide range of other issues that clearly damaged people based on perceived differences in group identity.
We created an Us with the white tribe and then we triggered a number of those Us-Them instincts to do a number of very negative things to other people who weren't members of that tribe.
Slavery was part of the package of extremely negative behaviors that we built as a country.
Slavery is an ultimate and extremely definitive Us-Them behavior. We had slavery as a key part of our history for over 200 years and we had to fight a very bloody war to get it out of existence.
The former slaves have been damaged in multiple ways by discriminatory laws and behaviors, and we've made great progress at multiple levels but we have a long way to go to achieve an optimal setting for everyone and for every group that lives here with any group identity triggers and differentiators that cause those instincts to happen.
We've achieved some very enlightened thinking as a country, and we have a functional governance infrastructure that gives us rule or law, a sense of legal equality for all of our people, and a sense of justice and fairness as an underpinning for our group behaviors.
Those enlightened elements function in the context of instinctive differences at multiple levels in our interactions with one another.
We need to create a working sense of Us that is based on our beliefs — and we know from doing that well in many settings that it's actually possible to do and a very good thing to do for ourselves and for each other.
Us-Them instincts are extremely powerful, and we need to use intellectual wisdom to create and build a new Us for the country that's based on our ideals and on our values, not just on our race.
Those instincts are flexible and powerful at the same time, and they can be channeled to build an Us based on our beliefs and not on our ethnicity or gender if we understand how those instincts work and then channel them down enlightened trajectories as a nation.
Let's Build Us on Enlightened Beliefs Instead of Race to Create Our Us
We have a set of inclusive and enlightened values that we can and should build on to create the very best America of the future. We need to overcome some very powerful challenges that have tribal thinking that will make those enlightened beliefs not easy to use at this point in our history if we want to create the very best trajectory going forward from here.
We can get there from here, but it won’t be easy, inevitable, or automatic. Because those instincts have such power over our thoughts, aspirations, and emotional interactions.
We're in danger of tribalizing politically in our country at this point in time and we need to help people understand how important it will be for us at this moment in time to teach the entire country that we need to rise above and optimize our most positive instincts at the core level to achieve inter group Peace rather than us go down the slippery slope to hurting each other by group and then having that group anger, division, and animosity last for a very long time as who we are as a people and a nation.
Let’s rise above that extremely seductive but damaging trajectory and let's be enlightened together as an American people.
Let’s figure this out together.
And become wise as an American group.
We need to understand where we are now.
As a country, we've discriminated against people by race, ethnicity, and tribe, and we've also discriminated massively by sex and gender.
We can’t plan our future trajectory for instinctive behavior and do it well unless we include the instincts that relate to sex and reproduction.
Sex is obviously extremely relevant and important to us at a functional level because it determines whether we'll have a future for purely biological reasons.
Our cultures have dealt in very explicit and sometimes complicated ways with sex.
Basic biological realities and functionalities have caused cultures everywhere to treat people differently by gender. We have a long history of discriminating against women at multiple levels. We didn't even give women the right to vote in this country until the most recent century, and we've discriminated at multiple levels in ways that we see happen clearly in cultures across the planet.
Babies are important.
We need babies in order to survive as a species. We need to have offspring, and we need them to survive and hopefully thrive in each setting.
In the early days of our species, when we were hunter-gatherers in our various villages, we had assigned roles by gender. We were hunters and we were gatherers and the assignments given in each setting included both sexes as a package of behaviors.
In many settings, we needed the men to protect the group and to hunt the game that created core survival calories in many settings, and we needed women to have babies and nurture them and protect them in ways that enabled them to survive and to thrive when possible.
We raise our children very slowly as a species and we need to feed and protect them for the better part of a decade at, a minimum level, to make sure they don’t all die after being born.
That reality and that functional context created some expectations and rules for our cultures about sex.
Our cultures serve our instincts in every setting. Our cultures are the sets of rules and expectations we set up in every community to achieve the goals and expectations that our instincts create. Our cultures give us the tools we need to make our instincts successful in each setting.
Our cultures have been important to us in every setting.
We're hard wired to be loyal to our group and we're hard wired to follow the cultures created by each group setting to guide our behavior.
Culture Serves Our Instincts at Multiple Levels
We're so linked and tied to our cultures and we accept their steerage so well that we will set up cultural rules for standing in line at airports, and people in the line feel real anger if someone violates those rules in that setting.
Each group creates its own culture and we tend to build them in very explicit ways with the intent of achieving the goals and expectations that our instincts create.
Loyalty is an instinctive behavior.
We tend to feel great loyalty to our groups and we extend that loyalty to the culture that our groups create.
We all tend to believe that our cultures are somehow right at a core level.
There are many rules about men and women in every culture — and we can see why some of them exist if we look at both our biology and our relative instinctive behaviors that relate to sexual issues.
Our cultures have roles for men and women about the basic functioning of every setting. Some of the cultural expectations for women that seem to exist everywhere clearly relate to keeping our children healthy and alive, and some of the cultural expectations for men are clearly intended to protect and enable and support those processes.
After women gave birth, the people in every setting needed an ongoing supply of food to keep the children alive. If we look at those settings where those kinds of family gatherings exist today, or existed in the recent past, the usual model in many settings was to have men skilled at hunting, fishing, and at the various kinds of protein collection processes that were needed by each group to keep the family fed.
Men often were expected by their cultures to hunt for food, and the male behaviors reinforced that process.
Mothers protected the children. Mothers also tended to maintain the hut and to cook or prepare the food for the family and group. They did a lot of gathering of nuts and berries, and the cultures of many groups often had those basic food gathering processes creating a major supply of calories as well to keep the family alive.
Many packages of instincts triggered both men and women by those realities. We had courting instincts, and both genders seemed to have parts of the courtship process that they liked doing and made a priority for their lives.
For the sake of this discussion, we're going to discuss and understand the instincts that tie to each gender and each sex in traditional ways and assume that basic biology is the key factor for the instincts and for the cultures set up in each setting.
Sex, itself, is an important factor in the instinctive behavior packages.
Sex can be a blessing and a positive experience and a beneficial activity for people when it happens in ways that work in functional and appropriate ways for the people involved — and it's also a hugely powerful and directionally instinctive behavior for many other species in the time frames and settings when it's the right thing to do to activate and trigger basic sexual activities for each species.
Wolves have instincts about sexual behavior, and wolves and other species that have sexual activity all seem and tend to make it a very real and important priority for their thoughts, actions, and behaviors at the point in the process where it's needed for that species to succeed and survive as a species.
Those patterns of sexual behavior are entirely specific and explicit to each species and they're not identical at any level as a generic set of behaviors between species.
Stallions and mares have obvious patterns that relate to sexual activity with immediate relevancy to horses and male salmon will actually sometimes swim 1000 miles to fertilize their eggs and those fish don’t have any other focus than that process when that particular set of sexual activities is needed for that species to survive.
We can easily see how a wide range of species do explicit sexual things at the right moments in time to keep their species intact and to have their species perpetuating itself in highly programmed sexual behaviors that repeat for every generation for each species.
We fall into that pattern of behavior for our own sexual activities in very clear and highly motivated and heavily choreographed activities that are obvious when we perceive them and understand what they are for our lives and for the survival of our offspring.
For our species, sex can actually be a beneficial, motivating, sometimes joyful, and often positive activity when we create and achieve the right alignments between sexual behaviors in our settings, our communities, and in our own lives.
Our cultures set up multiple expectations and rule sets about sexual behaviors, and the cultures for each group tend to create those expectations with the goal of both meeting our instinctive behavior goals and achieving the survival strategies of each group we belong to.
We have a number of behaviors and expectations created in our cultures by that hunter-gatherer reality to steer male and female behaviors and activities for the group.
We're in a very different functional and economic reality for our people today, but we have a long history as a species of being organized in the context of hunter-gatherer settings, and many of our culture expectations that still guide us today were based on that set of functional realities and have been carried into current times by the momentum created by our cultural histories of following those patterns of behaviors in our lives — and because we all instinctively tend to believe that what our cultures tell us to do in each setting is the right thing to do.
Some of our cultural patterns today have obvious links to the functional realities that we faced in our hunter-gatherer years as a species.
One set of goals and cultural guidelines and expectations that we see in many settings exists to keep the males in each group in long-term contact with their family setting and their biological tribe.
In many of those social and functional tribal groupings and settings, the cultures very much wanted the males in the setting to continue to hunt game and to protect the hearth against wild cats and hungry bears after the woman is impregnated, so most cultures built a reward system of some kind for the males to stay in the family setting and for males to not abandon the family that's part of his genetic trajectory.
One reward that cultures used to make that loyalty and consistency happen in many settings is sex itself.
Sex can be an extremely pleasant and positive thing, and it's often a priority interest and intellectual focus for many of our people at least part of the time. Both genders have sexual interests and activities — and the patterns seem to be a bit different in many settings based on both gender and functional realities.
Many young men have intense focus and high energy levels directed at sexual issues and that drives thinking, behaviors, and interactions with other people and with the community and context they live in that the cultures need to address with behaviors that channel those energies and drives in ways that help the group survive over time.
The normal pattern that we have has young men in most settings to have a strong interest in various levels of sexual activity and contact — and many young men tend to be highly motivated to have that activity as part of their lives. For some young men and settings, that particular motivation creates behaviors and energy levels that cultures need to channel in ways that help each group succeed and survive and to prevent disruptive behavior for the social settings when judgement issues can be challenged and even impaired by the sexual priorities and activities of the men.
Men under the influence of sexual activation can do stupid and even damaging things — and communities, groups, and cultures all tend to have developed various ways of channeling that energy to less damaging types and levels of activity for those men.
A candid and open discussion of those interests and instincts requires honest discussion and sufficient disclosure relative to those thought processes and behaviors by both genders is every setting. We can’t steer clearly to guidance and understanding about future levels of sexual activity for our communities and settings if we don’t factor that interest and level of energy into the discussions in accurate and honest ways and then understand how we should deal with those instincts and energies now in the context of the cultures we create and live in today.
Most cultures that we can see in those hunter-gatherer settings addressed those issues very directly, and we know that a number of cultures decided to even limit sexual activity for men to the family setting for those men. Sex in any other setting was against the law for both men and women in many cultures, and young men who wanted to have sex in those basic communities dealt with the rule set for many cultures was that men needed to be married and have a wife in order to have that sexual contact and sexual activity was only supposed to happen for those men in the context of that relationship and with their spouse.
Each of our cultures has tried to set the expectations for sexual behavior in their settings and most of the rules and laws we see as expectations today are the result of those realities.
Several sets of instinctive behaviors are actually activated, triggered, and guided by that set of sexual interests and motivations in each community and setting and we have those realities steering us today.
We actually have some powerful and influential alpha instincts that have been relevant to that process and to sexual behavior in many settings.
Alpha Instincts Have Major Impact in Multiple Ways for Gender and Power
One of the strongest instincts we generally have as people is to actually achieve and maintain alpha status in a setting. People aspire to be alpha and many find the psychological neurochemical rewards of being alpha to be very rewarding emotionally and to be clearly motivational for their thinking and behavior in many settings.
There are a number of neurochemical rewards that get triggered in the wolf packs and in the lion prides and in the herds of horses by achieving alpha status for the group, and we have an obvious set of parallel behaviors that happen for our alpha members of our groups and cause those neurochemicals to happen in our settings.
We can see alpha status in many areas and settings at various levels for the settings.
Men tend to be heads of families in most of our community settings.
Almost every culture that we've seen across the planet has set up men to be the alpha head of each family. Men have traditionally been family leaders with that status — and even the US census listed men as “head of family” in our country on that reporting system about three decades ago.
Men have been rewarded and enticed with that status in many cultures and settings to stay with their marriages and families to achieve both sex and power in their own lives because sex happens in marriages and being the head of a family group triggers that sense of being alpha for at least part of the setting and makes sexual activity more likely to happen.
Marriages also gave men logistical and intellectual confidence and assurances that they were more likely to be the actual biological parent of the children in their family.
The issue of parentage is also a key factor in our cultural rule set for many settings and gets a high level of energy and interest for each family where children exist.
Women always know which child they gave birth to, but we can’t always tell, determine, or know who was the actual father of any particular child.
Men stay with families in part by believing that the children in that setting came from their lineage, and the very restrictive rules and requirements about women’s behavior that exist in many cultures helped create and reinforce that belief and those restrictions for women can make men feel more comfortable about making the commitment to support the relationships they're in.
That biological and functional reality about uncertain parentage for children relative to the father of each child has caused many cultures to set up very strict rules about women's contact with other men to make sure that each man is protecting and feeding his own children.
Some cultures have set up extremely negative and highly controlling functions for women for that area, and those cultures sometimes do cruel and damaging things to women to enforce those rules.
Some cultures expel women from the culture or setting if they believe that the woman might have violated some of those strict behavior and interaction rules.
Women are killed today in some settings if their family believes that that kind of violation of the sanctity of the isolation has occurred for the woman.
Even today, we have many thousands of “honor killings” happening in several cultures where the brothers or other family members stone and kill girls who spent any time in any setting that they believed possibly meant that her “honor” might have been impaired.
The possibility of a mistake in that area of absolute functional security on the honor issue for women is enough to get many girls killed today. That's a horrible situation, and we should do what we can to not support or encourage that behavior in the many places where it still happens.
We need to not allow women to be damaged by those sets of expectations and rules in those other settings when we have any influence on those realities in those areas.
We need to not do sexual abuse in our own settings as well.
We need to have our own gender-related negative behavior channeled in good directions. We need to have actual sexual abuse in our country reduced to low levels and we need our work settings to be functionally intolerant of damaging behavior that hurt women in wide range of ways.
We actually have made significant progress in our country on many gender-related abuse issues in those areas in the last couple of years as the result of the Me Too movement that made women in many of our settings less accepting of some negative and inappropriate behaviors that we ignored for many years, and we have created a significantly better level of expectations relative to a wide range of negative sexual behavior in many of our settings as the result of that awareness.
We need to be very honest, insightful, and wise relative to our own expectations about sexual behavior and activities today.
The internet and the new artificial intelligence tool kits have made pornography and sexual imagery of various kinds available to anyone and we need to understand some of the risks we face now on sexual behaviors and issues with that flow of sexual imagery constantly and easily in play.
We're increasingly vulnerable to the new artificial intelligence sex toys and even actual sex toy robots, and they'll be an increasing threat at an alternative way of having our sexual needs met going forward from where we are now on all of those functions, tools, and opportunities.
That's an extremely different world than the world we have lived in up to now.
Instagram and its various clone and equivalent purchasing mechanisms now sell artificial sex toys and artificial intelligence sexual companions that are extremely effectively designed to meet some of the sexual instincts and perceived needs of both men and women in our society today.
Sex should be a positive, beneficial, and even wonderful thing for many people, because it’s so deeply engrained in who we are, and it can be so good as a benefit in our lives if we deal with it in the most appropriate ways and if we have our instincts and tools aligned with the world we now live in.
We need to understand what happens as patterns for much of that behavior for each gender. Men and women don't have identical instincts on sexual issues and behaviors, and we need to build a future society where we can all end up with sexual activity and protections that give us the best pathways to our entire lives.
Men tend to be, on average, much more visual in the activation of the core sets of sex related instincts.
Men will continue to be instinctively triggered to explicit and direct visual sexual stimulation because that’s wired into our brains and our perceptions, and there’s no reason not to deal with that in the most appropriate, useful, and respectful ways without saying that it’s wrong or inappropriate to have those visual triggers as part of who we are and part of our life experience.
We need to be non-obtrusive and noninvasive in our sexual interactions, and we should be respectful and quietly appreciative of the beauty and the visual benefits that we can see in each other in each of those settings where sexual imagery is part of the experiences and the patterns of our lives.
We should be able to celebrate being visually pleased and attracted in respectful and appropriate ways to whomever we find meets our hopes and our expectations for visual stimulation and sexual interest visual triggers and we should appreciate that those visual triggers exist and can steer us to positive sexual reactions and behaviors.
We need to recognize that sexual imagery should be non-obtrusive and private, and we should be respectful of the people who are currently seen in those sexual settings on the internet without creating actual physical infidelity in the process.
We Need to be Aiming Completely Consensually for Connubial Bliss and Successful Marriage that Blossom and Thrive
Both sexes are wired to be highly visual in their sexual interests, and that’s not a bad thing because it's so very real and can and should be addressed in ways that create visual pleasure and also very carefully violate no privacy issues for the relevant people and settings of our lives.
The internet is a reality, and there’s obviously no way we cannot have it be a major visual influence in our lives and we should use that tool kit in the most civilized, equitable, and respectful ways because we should now be creating our future patterns and trajectories for interacting with each other in very intentionally appropriate ways.
It should all be extremely consensual.
We should have consensual and voluntary visual relevance to be part of the next wave of expectations we need to address and deal with in our web-related information sharing for this next generation of sexual instinct activation.
We have some guidance from a theologian that we could use for steerage at this point in our history.
The Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about the blessings of God in our lives in his thought pieces, essays, sermons, and books, and he counted and celebrated Connubial Bliss as one of the very best blessings we get from a loving God because it can be so wonderful when it's done well and when it's mutually enjoyed by a loving couple as a foundation for a marriage.
Swedenborg strongly believed in marriage in a very Lutheran and Christian way and he believed that we each should be married and that we should learn to each find what he labelled as mutual connubial bliss in that relationship.
He believed that we should enjoy the entire array of those marital activities that exist and he basically thanked God for the opportunity to have sex and to have marriage related bliss be part of our lives.
Most people don’t use that strategy to enhance and improve their lives, and very few people understand or appreciate the value that marriages can create if we approach them in the right way and then optimize their impact in our lives.
Far too many people don’t understand, think about, or consider the opportunity that is and can be presented by marriage in their lives. We all tend to get married, but we too often overlook the opportunity to make that marriage an anchor function and a working context for optimizing our lives.
We might want to make that use of marriage a goal, a strategy, and a context for improving our own lives.
We could and should make that decision — and we should decide in that context to have each married couple working with themselves to optimize key aspects of that relationship in well considered, extremely intentional, highly skillful, and deeply loving ways.
Married couples should each have their own internal strategy and their own awareness on those issues and each couple should be very honest with themselves and with each other about what aspects of their marriage can support that process and what they can each do to reinforce each other to make their marriage a success.
Sex is a foundational component and activity within marriage and it can be an anchor behavior for creating connubial bliss.
As we look at sexual activity and at our related instinctive behaviors, it’s clear that we should be completely and absolutely consensual in our interactions as an anchor for the whole process.
As a basic belief and commitment, we should avoid any nonconsensual sexual behaviors and we should avoid coercive sexual activities with the other people in the sexual components of our world.
No one should be forced into any sexual behavior.
We should all be entitled to relevant privacy as well.
Privacy issues are extremely important and relevant to us in the internet age. We need to respect and protect privacy for all parties., We shouldn't have anyone on the internet sending or sharing visual information that was stolen or that was taken from any private sources without the approval of the person being portrayed in the piece and information. We should each be respectful of that information and shouldn't encourage or support coercive or nonconsensual sharing of that kind of information in any setting.
As we look at visual images on the internet, there’s no reason for us not to decide to use visual images that we believe are consensual in their availability and their display.
In the context of Connubial Bliss, each couple can and should set their own standards for the visual availability of images of the world and of each other and should work out the rule sets and standards that work for each relationship for viewing information and activity and we should understand and appreciate the joy and beauty of visual images that fall into those clear instinctive awarenesses and guidance.
We need to support marriages electronically. That’s obviously not flowing against the current of internet use for a wide range of activities because we should be able to use internet information and images to help each marriage create its own visual world.
The highest volume of use for the internet today actually is sexual images.
Pornography is booming.
There are many levels of pornography that use sexual visual information as a core component for their processes and information and they make up a major component of volume on the web.
We Now Have Growing Numbers of Direct Sexual Contacts and Interactions that Happen Only on the Internet
The pornography use of the internet was expected, but what wasn’t expected and what's been a surprise to many people has been much more direct and personal sexual interactions that are also now connected on the internet.
We now have a large number of internet-based sexual interactions that didn’t exist in our world until the newest set of direct sexual interactions have been added to the process and have now become part of the business model of the internet.
The internet now is creating direct contacts between people on sexual issues in ways that are very different than our prior interactions, contacts, and linkages that have been our traditional sex related interactions between people in our country.
Many people are on the route of consensual and personal visual sharing of sexual information with each other in our country today through internet connections, and that's likely to be part of the new normal for visual realities and context going forward as the next set of interactions for those instinctive behaviors today.
It's now possible for people to create a direct and personal interaction link with other people in this country in a series of sex-related viewings that allow people to share sexual images and see behaviors in purely electronic ways that are highly visual and inherently, extremely personal because they link people with others in very direct and personal ways.
Men and women can now use the internet to share sexual images very directly in a personal way with each other, and that sharing process has become a business because millions of men are willing to pay women in order to have that sharing happen.
They're creating direct and personal internet contact with women with those instincts obviously activated and millions of men are now paying women for some levels of sexual visibility and for some levels of dialogue and communication on sexual issues that happen only through electronic connections and electronic interactions.
Ninety million American men are currently purchasing those direct sexual interactions with the women who decide sell those services, and it appears that about 80 million of those men who pay for that visual information are married.
A significantly smaller number of women are selling those services to the men. About 5 million women are signed up with the full set of contacts and relationships that cause them to show their naked bodies to men and to sell those visual images to the men, and about 2 million of those women have significant numbers of customers for their sites.
Some of the women make millions of dollars.
Most of the women who signed up for the business make thousands of dollars and a small number make hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars from those transactions.
Those are all huge numbers.
Ninety million men is a big number.
Eighty million married men is also a very big number.
Five million women selling those services and those views is also a very big and very real number.
There aren’t very many things happening on the internet that make those numbers for either men or women look small or insignificant.
This thought piece is about instinctive behavior. Tribal warfare is instinctive and so are family alignments and reproductive behaviors in all of our settings.
The numbers on this set of activities tell us that there are instinctive behaviors involved for both the men and the women because instincts are the only thing that steer behavior in every setting. Carl Jung told us very insightfully and clearly that when a human behavior is the same in every setting, that means that an instinct is involved.
Ninety million married men is a big number and the equivalent of a lot of settings that must have an instinct anchoring those processes.
Men have very strong instincts to be visual on sexual instincts, and that particular service has men paying for what they report to be their favorite sexual images and views and doing it with a growing customer base for that product.
Every species has different sets of sex-related instincts for each gender, and we follow that pattern as people. We don’t have those same visual instincts for our women, but there are other very powerful instincts that create the women’s side of the OnlyFans business model.
Greed and acquisition instincts exist for us in every culture and they have a role here with this process that creates those participants to the mix.
Women have different but highly relevant instincts in the mix that turn that interaction into a business and a product.
We have very strong instincts as both men and women to acquire things and to attain and accumulate wealth.
Wealth instincts are clearly activated by this process.
The women who are selling the visual images of their bosoms are not doing it to satisfy some basic instincts to be seen, but they do get paid real money for being seen and one of our most powerful instincts for both sexes is to acquire money and to accumulate wealth.
That acquisition instinct is the relevant instinct for this process. It's the functional reality that's causing the women to sell that service and to sell those interactions to their customers in that business.
There's a business associated with those contacts that links both sets of those instincts and it's doing well as a flow of cash on the internet today in a very obvious and motivational way for the women who get paid for what they give to their customers with that product and who aspire to acquire assets, resources, and even wealth, when possible, as part of the normal patterns of their lives.
Both men and women aspire at an instinctive level to accumulate resources for their lives. It's possible for millions of women to accumulate significant and immediate resources from this OnlyFans process.
We know from various reporting processes that about 2 million of the OnlyFans women make up about 90 percent of those 90 million contacts and another 3 or 4 million women have much lower volumes of customers as the process works today and are also charging for those contacts at a direct level and are getting paid real money for their services.
The instincts are triggered because the money goes directly to them for all of those women.
That’s obviously motivating at an instinctive level.
All of those OnlyFans active women charge men for their visual interactions. Some of those women make large sums of money for those contacts. Some seem to make millions of dollars, if the some of the internet reports are accurate.
Most of those women make much less money, but they all still get paid in real money fairly quickly for those services and that cash flow can be important and relevant to actual people and to the financial realities of their lives in real time.
Men contract functionally at a direct level with each woman at a direct and personal level in the OnlyFans world because it’s a very targeted and personal interchange and interaction, and the men and women have both conversations and visual sexual exposure and displays that are requested, selected and paid for by the men in exchange for that money.
Some of the 2 million women who are doing that work with some higher success levels say in interviews and discussions that are posted on the internet that they often aren’t asked to do much more than have a nice conversation with the men who contact them and then they share their own bosoms visually with the men who pay them to do that display for them. The interactions in that process are very direct and personal at one basic level because they actually are direct and personal in that model.
It's very clear that our sexual instincts relative some kinds of visual interactions are so strong that some men are willing and even eager to pay women for that perception and that view if that opportunity to make that purchase exists.
There are a number of men who know how much they would like to see the bodies of women and we know that interest level is true because that product exists and because it has 90 million customers today.
Men and women seem to have very different perspectives on those behaviors and issues.
There are thousands of social media sites and linkage’s run and created by women that have many million viewers and millions of links, and those sites run by women in social media settings never mention the actual sets of instincts that are motivating those 90 million men or mention of discuss what men are actually creating as their own aspirations and approaches to the gender issues we face in our communities and settings.
We know that women never mention or discuss those topics because the internet is overwhelmed with those sites and we know what those sites discuss and focus on. It’s a very public set of topics, and the OnlyFans topics and priorities are completely and totally invisible in the sites run by women for women.
There's almost no hint on any of the social media outlets that have links to millions of women on the part of women that most women know how much those sets of instincts and aspirations affect the thinking and behavior of men.
There might be some lost opportunities for us as people in that entire world of communications. Men are willing to pay to see bosoms, and it's entirely possible and actually logical that some and even many of those 90 million men who make that choice would actually prefer to see the bodies and the bosoms of the women they're married to rather than just seeing only stranger skin on their computer screens.
That might be happening now to some degree.
There's an extremely high likelihood that the large number of current marriages that don’t have a man purchasing a look at other women today have much better interactions within the marriages and have much better and much more often and even frequent visual experiences within the marriage.
The internet currently tells us from multiple postings done by men in their web settings that many of the men who receive various kinds of sex-related selfie photos from their spouse or marital partner today tend to be happy men who are pleased and sometimes delighted with their visual affirmations that they receive in various ways within their own marriage.
It’s possible and even probable that many men buying that service would rather actually see the actual bosom in-person for their own domicile contact and actual cohabitant, rather than pay to see it electronically. through OnlyFans.
It might be a very sad commentary on how inept we seem to be in some of our levels of understanding and in our current relationships in this country that we don’t have enough honesty, insight and candor to communicate with each other inside those 90 million marriages about those wants, needs, issues, and behaviors so that we could simply explain to our spouse what we aspire to and prefer to do and would like to see in our relationships with each other.
We might be making it more complicated than it needs to be for many settings.
Men are clearly often very simple creatures.
Men are wired to be visual.
Male turkeys can be tricked into courting a female turkey that only exists as a silhouette if the artist sets up the outline to have a clearly female set of tail feathers for the male turkey to see, recognize, and aspire to. The boy turkeys are clearly visual at an instinctive level for that part of the courting process — and it’s not hard to imagine what silhouette alternatives might trigger somewhat similar responses for men of our species.
Women are usually a bit less visual and many women with social media linkages say they don’t understand what the men aspire to or why they aspire to that vision and to that direct and explicit view of an actual bosom in that process.
It’s hard to imagine that 90 million married women would pay to see any visual thing about each other or their partners and their couple components, because that’s clearly not how most women are wired visually.
It’s not impossible to imagine that some or even many of the 90 million women in those marriages might find having their own body seen and having their own body appreciated in an appropriate way by their husband or partner in their own home might actually be a positive and affirming thing for at least some of those women.
It’s even possible that having that explicit and direct visual information sharing happen could be a positive encounter within the marriage that could be relatively easy to accomplish if it felt like the right thing to do in the context of the relationship between the people involved in each setting agreed to it, and if the parties had an honest and non-judgmental conversation about what was happening and why they were doing what they were doing to create that outcome and visual reality.
Women seem to tend to hugely and significantly underestimate in many purely heterosexual relationships how much their own husbands actually love enjoy, and often actually appreciate visually perceiving and seeing the body of the woman who is their partner for connubial bliss — as the theologian wisely suggests us to think about our marriages.
Many men logically love and appreciate their own spouses and it seems only logical that at least some men would rather get some direct visual stimulation from their partner as an enjoyable experience in-person in the marriage, rather than pay someone to give them that basic visual impact and then receive that information and visual impact over the internet from a total stranger.
We should do a much better job in the context of our marriages telling and teaching each other what those visual request and sexual interests are in some respectful and loving way at home and by pointing out to all parties that it's clearly sub-optimal functionally and financially to actually have that external commercial process collecting money for the visual looks at those connubial bosoms that 90 million men are clearly willing to pay for now.
We should agree with Reverand Swedenborg that we should function effectively in the context created by our marriages for many millions of people and we should try to achieve, support, and enjoy connubial bliss in as many settings as possible now.
Marriage can create wonderful, beneficial, and mutually supportive experiences for people and we will be stronger and more economically successful as a community and a nation if our marriages are successful in ways that we know are possible because they happen for some couples and some settings now and it obviously can be done.
That includes every kind of marriage between consenting adults, and we should aspire to have them all succeed in as many settings as possible and we should celebrate and support all versions of marriages that people care to create.
We have some risks ahead of us relative to the instincts that tie us to sexual behavior, and we should aspire to have those instincts be an asset for us as a community and a people.
We humans have very strong sexual instincts, and we should learn to deal with them in the most effective ways given the availability of the internet as a key component of that entire process today.
There are some alarming warning signs happening on sexual issues here at several levels.
A very high percentage of our youngest men aren’t dating, and a growing number of younger men now say they don’t intend to marry. They have a high level of contact with pornography as part of their sexual interest and involvement level. And basically, some seem to have their own kinds of addiction to pornography as part of that entire visual process.
We would be much better off as a country if we decided to make marriage a top priority as a society and if we learned to do a better job with those marital interactions by recognizing the instincts we have for families and sex, and if we learned to get better at both.
Connubial bliss should be our goal.
We might want to set up a new set of expectations about connubial bliss and we should steer both young men and young women down that pathway, because it can be so much better for people’s lives when it happens — and it’s entirely possible to steer in that direction if we know what we're doing and show how good it can be for both parties when it happens with loving commitments from both parties in each setting.
We should steer away from the worst components of that sexual behavior and we absolutely should grow in wisdom and understanding, and then steer away from the worst Us-Them instincts that get triggered all too often by our tribal behavior.
We've reached the point where artificial intelligence and related commercial interests are creating sexual programming that gives customers a very strong and carefully designed set of programs that make the customers feel sexually stimulated and sexually pleased through some processes that feel sexually right to the people who buy and use those programs.
Those programs tie to and link with our powerful sets of sexual instincts, and they're dangerous, because those instincts are so powerful and we feel the neurochemical rewards triggered by them in very addictive ways when they are activated. Those programs will have increasing customer bases, and will round out those levels of interaction going forward from now.
We also have a growing number of extremely realistic and very attractive and well-designed sex robots that perform actual physical sex acts that also link to those physical and instinctive behaviors with actual contacts and interactions and give their owners sexual services and activities that exceed the fantasies that people had before that set of tools existed.
Instagram and similar purchasing tools can now link you to a personal sex robot that is relatively affordable and promises to be continuously improving in both performance and design.
We're living in a strange new world relative to those sets of issues, and we need to get grounded in our overall reaction to our basic instincts because they're going to steer our lives and we should be well informed and wise in what we choose to do now in our communities and our world with our instincts serving us and not leading us to damage in the new internet world that we're going to be living in.
We need to understand what those agendas and problems actually are and how much momentum they create.
Fashion Exceeds Pornography as a Focus for Many People on Social Media Today
The highest volume of internet use for women today is actually fashion and not pornography.
That isn’t understood by many people.
People almost worship fashion,
Beauty is a goal, a focus, an expectation, a standard, a priority and an aspiration for a high percentage of our population today.
Many women on the internet business sites are selling beauty and fashion to other customers on the web. The people with those services and beauty products have a major influence and impact on our lives today and that will probably grow.
Our culture tends to be obsessed with beauty and appearance, and we have a rich array of businesses that help women with their makeup and with their apparel at levels that exceed the levels of volume for the sites that do pornography.
Go to Instagram and TikTok to see what is being sold to and who is selling it.
Our culture has many rules and expectations about the makeup levels of our women, and we have many extremely skilled vendors who are selling optimal beauty agendas and tools to the women of our country and who use the internet to make those sales.
Many websites sell beauty, and some address the issues of beauty being used to bring people together and create various kinds of relationships with gender involvement and alignment. Beauty is a focus and priority for those sites.
Even the sites that offer alternative thoughts on marriage approaches and marital behavior and alignments tend to have beauty for the women in those marriages and relationships as an aspiration, achievement, and clear and constant goal of the process.
We have an extensive and energized web fabric of beauty options that fill the internet.
It’s clear that those options and those sites are not set up by men who want to micromanage the cosmetics and the appearances of the women in their lives, but by women who believe in a culture of physical beauty and who steer their customers down those paths with the goal of achieving the best skin, best eye décor, and best appearances in whatever settings women find themselves in with a rich array of products to make that happen.
The likelihood of American women in our culture today going from their home into the outside world makeup-free with bare skin is very low, because that’s not what our cultures and what most of our community and our lead women seem to tell other women to do with their faces and skin.
Many people who communicate on those processes and issues seem to think that women in our country with no makeup will be rejected by the world around them and will have problems both with men and with other women in their setting if they're ever actually make-up free.
Multiple instinctive behavior issues about cultural acceptance get triggered by those realities and we know from basic observation what issues exist for many women in our country with those issues.
We haven't linked the social agenda with the coupling agenda with the marital alignment and success agenda with the array of products and priorities that exist on the internet today and now.
It would be a good thing if we somehow found the alignment between fashion perfection and marital happiness and spouse acquisition success in a process that supported women going forward in every setting and created real success in both our presentations of ourselves and our aspirations for optimal appearance and marital bliss with beauty as workable component of that priority and process.
On the bigger scale, we need to help get sex aligned with our social and our societal behaviors going forward.
As a minimum goal, we need to make sure that we do the right things to end the sexual damages and problems that still exist in too many settings, and that can be exacerbated when we have tribes fighting each other and doing damage to each other in those key areas.
We Need to Slow Tribalism for America
We definitely need to slow down the rate of tribalization in this country, because we face the risk of being badly damaged as people and a nation by that package of instinctive behaviors in the wrong hands.
Gaza has chosen tribal instincts as its primary set of priorities and activities, and we're now going past 50,000 dead people there and living people who hate each other and who will damage each other indefinitely with those instincts in gear and having those instincts making evil behavior feel legitimate and right for everyone living in that setting.
We need everyone in our own country to understand how dangerous our own tribal instincts are and how damaging our Us-Them behaviors are, and why we need to avoid them in the future to have a peaceful and safe future for our own communities and country.
Some people say that the most militant members of our population are currently triggered and anchored by anger against the people who run various settings, but that belief misses the point that the people who are most militant are tribal, and they're loyal to their tribe and they're damaging people for tribal loyalty reasons — not because they are angry people.
We need to rise above tribe.
We have a chance to succeed at this point in our history if we do this right.
We need to believe in America.
This chapter in the third edition of The Art of InterGroup Peace explains what we should commit to as a country to steer us in the right direction.
Check out Chapter 17 of the Art of InterGroup Peacebook.
That chapter looks at our entire set of core and basic beliefs and asks us to become an American Us based on what we believe to be true and based on what we believe we should build as a country.
Send in your thoughts to the Institute website about which of those enlightened commitments should evolve as we go forward as a country to create the future we should be achieving now in this country.
We also need to decide that telling the truth should return as an expectation for Americans, and that we should go down that path now.
We need to absolutely understand how powerful our instincts are and we need to understand how much they influence our lives every day of our lives.
We need to be well everyone.
It’s the right time for us to do exactly that and to actually be well as a people and a country and a set of believers who think enlightened behaviors should be our goal and our strategy going forward from here.