AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram

"TRAINING FOR AWARENESS, RESILIENCE AND ACTION": A Handbook for Depressed Kids

(This is a bit of a side-bar for the five Domain discussion I've been pursuing.)

TARA is the acronym for addressing problems of adolescence based on the RDoC approach of brain pathways rather than labeling and sorting using the Diagnostic labels.  That is, reconciling assumptions about clinical issues with what is known about the brain from neurology research. These thoughts (TARA's are the ones in italics) are meant for all kids, but esp. for troubled kids.  Is there such a thing as an untroubled kid?  Anyway, the goal is a handbook which should be published soon.

Training for Awareness, Resilience and Action

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137278/

“Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the current leading causes of disability worldwide. Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the onset of depression, with MDD affecting 8–20% of all youth. Traditional treatment methods have not been sufficiently effective to slow the increasing prevalence of adolescent depression. We therefore propose a new model for the treatment of adolescent depression – Training for Awareness, Resilience, and Action (TARA) – that is based on current understanding of developmental and depression neurobiology. The TARA model is aligned with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) of the National Institute of Mental Health. . .

“Approximately 13–20% of the children living in the United States experience a psychiatric disorder often including depressive disorders, with suicide being the second leading cause of death among US children aged 12–17 years in 2010 (Perou et al., 2013)”

Studying brain systems is complicated by development, which is the main characteristic of adolescents, and offers many chances for something to not-get-done/do-too-much/go-entirely-missing.  Three special considerations are understanding the causes, predicting what will happen, and figuring out what to do about it.

Brain systems often evolve from the pre-existing substrate “animal” or limbic impulses by imposing new restraints rather adding something novel.  Maturation can mean "wait now!"  The internal restraints that are not yet in place for adolescents may include those on impulsivity, risk-taking, novelty-seeking, increased emotional intensity and reactivity.  These impulses are naturally present in most mammals and are vital to the exploration of behavior that expands cultures.  A young animal that will not risk doesn't learn to hunt or find a new range.  It stays in place, dependent on adults for food.  In other words, it's "domesticated," an aberration good for the people who "own" them.  It's close to depression IMHO.

The benefit of risk goes to the survival of the culture rather than that of the individual, since a percentage of individuals (8–20% ?) can be sacrificed without destroying  the larger group.  The reality is that in every population, human or not, some individuals are going to be lost.  The culture wants it to be the children of the Other, not them.  

These are the principles of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.  Thus, high school students work hard to be excellent football players so they will earn scholarships to good schools where they will destroy each other's brains by bashing into each other.  But many of the players will be ghetto kids who will flunk out anyway, after making a lot of money for the institution of higher learning.  Pencil-necked mild kids will make it all the way to post-grad and earn the big salaries the ghetto kids only imagined.  They are domesticated and will donate generously to their Alma Maters. They are likely to struggle with depression IMHO.

Since human mental restraints are located in the prefrontal cortex, damage to the forehead and other frontal areas may delay or eliminate some of the regulatory capacity.  This is the age of reconciliation between the need to belong to a peer-group, and also the need for autonomy.  Many little neurological structures that control emotion, ruminating (going obsessively over and over one’s experience), and other processes that can become depression vortexes, are just maturing and settling their internal interaction with each other.  Raw cognition is not so much a problem as figuring out how to put it together.  The specifics of this stuff is well or at least thoroughly described in the document linked at the beginning.

Survivor.

The other side of the equation is that developing youngsters are still plastic enough to compensate in major ways, if they have enough of what they need and some shelter.

The concept of anhedonia comes up often and seems to be less about inability to accept pleasure -- the origin of the term -- than about emptiness which doesn’t come from boredom so much as from feeling hopeless, pathologically lonely, and isolated.  “There’s nothing to do, this place hates me, I can’t wait to escape.”  They may refuse all awards, honors and praise as attempts to control or as just lies.  I see this around here, both on the rez and off, and it is also clear in the “Bridgend” movie.  This is where S-R breaks down for adolescents.

Here is a list of red flags for depression:

1. Sustained threat with symptoms of anxious arousal, increased conflict detection, attentional bias to threat and emotion-laden stimuli, helplessness behavior, punishment sensitivity and avoidance.

2. Arousal and wakefulness including limbic and autonomic hyperarousal with manifestations such as insomnia and secondary sleep dependent behavioral dysfunctions.

3. Loss, including feelings of sadness, guilt, shame, low self-esteem, worry, rumination, increased self-focus, and withdrawal.

4. Attention and cognitive control with concentration difficulties, distractibility, and low impulse control.

5. Approach motivation, mechanisms of reward learning and social processes such as social communication, perception and understanding self and others and self knowledge are valuable salutogenic life skills which should be addressed in treatment of adolescent depression.  [WTF is "salutogenic"?  Does it mean you're the Salutatorian?"]

These are the children of prostitutes in India who were taught by a female photographer to use cameras which made them all very happy and positive.  Not all of them were able to leave the brothel community.  A few won prizes and traveled.

This is a list of functions to address.  

They’re mostly “mindfulness” learning.  “Mindfulness” is a range of techniques for “being here now,” for increasing awareness of one’s own internal life in the normally unconscious part of the brain and responding body.  The team working on TARA likes yoga, but there are “disciplines” (the restrictive sound of the word is unfortunate) in every culture that respond to this approach from “walking meditation,” to retreats, but the Asian traditions (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist) have honored them the most.

1. Improve autonomic regulation and decreased hyper-arousal and limbic hyper-reactivity (with hypothesized secondary effects on sleep disturbances).  Unconscious stuff, but habits can be built consciously.

2. Practice attention and interoceptive (internal signals) awareness to enhance dynamic switching away from self-evaluative processing and rumination.  Suffering, danger, hunger, forced labor, abuse and unwanted sex are all imposed experience that destroy this awareness as a way of protecting the self.  It will take assurance of safety to do this.  

When I've been in groups that were intense, the counselor would sometimes say to someone:  "What are you feeling right now?"  Sometimes they didn't know.  Sometimes they realized something surprising, not what they had thought.

3. Promote emotion recognition by training interoceptive awareness (emotion) and enhance prefrontal cortical regulation of affect by practicing labeling and communication of emotions.  It can be a shock and confusion to begin “feeling” without ways to think about feeling.

4. Train top-down cognitive control over affective responses such as negatively biased states of attention, processing, thinking, memory, rumination, and dysfunctional attitudes.  These are dashboard skills: seeing the speedometer needle go up and being able to take one’s foot off the gas.  (Simply braking may not be the answer.)

5. Identify intrinsic values to drive pro-social behavior and increase motivation for committed behavioral activation.  This moves the attention out of the person and into the culture, but in a supported way.

To repeat in slightly different language:

1.  Calm down and create a sense of safety.  Learn how to match detection of danger to reality.  To respond too little is to be vulnerable, but to respond too much is damaging.

2.  Attend to and care about inner experience.   Build your emotional dashboard.

3.  Recognize, regulate and communicate emotions.  Calm the limbic, clarify the pre-frontal thoughts.  

4.  Core values, goal setting and committed action -- connecting the cortico-limbic with the thoughtful pre-frontal processes.

COMMENTS:

I hardly qualify to reflect personally on this material myself since I’ve handled my unconscious mostly by stuffing it down and putting my effort into the rational, often by writing, which many kids do online now.  One risks others reading what was tentative and exploratory, and freaking out -- trying to take over and impose order or THEIR answers.  

Here is a metaphor.  The only way to learn how to drive on ice -- short of a skid-pad -- is to find a safely frozen pond or parking lot (shallow enough to keep from drowning if you break through) and cut cookies, slam brakes, etc.  In actual practice on real ice you are risking a roll-over.  Good to have someone standing by, even when exploring one’s own guts.  As the Brits say, “Take advice.”  

If early versions of humans had evolved as naturally rational beings, with onset of sexuality delayed until full maturity, we would not have an overpopulation problem.  They might be always waiting for just the right moment to fall in love, which means risking children without the skid-pad of marriage.  See how dangerous metaphors are?  

Anyway, it’s inaccurate to think that sexual feelings are only present in teens.  It’s like saying that eating is only important at one stage of life.  The survival basics are always present.  The problem is not eliminating them, but managing them in an authentic way.

NAUGHTY or NICE? RADI or PIP? IDEALIST or TERRORIST? DOMESTIC or WILD?

Over the last few days I’ve been playing with categories in an almost careless way so as to break up some assumptions and maybe even invent some new ones.  This is what I’ve got laid out so far:  

1.  Genetically controlled behavior with “domesticated” creatures being now recognized as due in part to specific molecular mutations that made survival success contingent on relating to humans.  This exposes the animals to human cultural mutations that might not be helpful to the animals after all: either using animals like machines or making them play human emotional roles.  Central Park carriage horses or dogs in purses.  Horses with ODD are good for rodeo bucking events which is arguably an adaptation of human to animal.

2.  Clinically derived theories about two kinds of “aggression,” one based in the “hot”, “hard-wired” synapses that support freeze/flight/fight reactions to threats (RADI) and the other based on the learned conviction that in a hostile environment, one must use any means necessary -- including plotting and pre-empting -- in order to personally survive (PIP).

3.  Categories used for diagnosis in the elaborate medical-style codes of the psych people, including one of two “aggressive” syndromes that is called ODD for Obstinate Defiance Disorder.  Many of these categories are so close together that they’re hard to distinguish.  (Check out Reactive Attachment Disorder.)  There are many versions of these code systems, depending on the culture -- that is, the German system is not the same as the American system because “normal” is described in different world views in the first place.

4.  These definitions are related to the concept of survival (the basic drive of all animals) and must split the difference between what is important for the survival of the individual as opposed to the survival of the group.  Many dynamics and scenarios apply here.  One of intense concern right now is behavior related to Ebola: some individuals are willingly risking themselves while others flee; groups react similarly, some denying and some coping.  The overall context, which is expressed in economics, is being radically changed at the expense of individual, group, and planetary responses.  These will cause cultural shifts.

Long ago I read a teaching/managing book that was about “why people don’t learn.”  It reflected on different KINDS of causes.  I don’t have the book anymore but these elements are what I remember.

1.  The capacity to perform the task is not there in the specific individual.  Men don’t get pregnant, no matter how hard you try to impregnate them.  

2.  Though the person could learn the skill with special help, that’s not present.  The runner must have legs and if he is an amputee, he will need prosthetics or wheels.

Beethoven, but is that a piano?

3.  Specific instrumentation is needed but not present.  What is Beethoven without a piano?  He can function after hearing loss -- if he has a good memory associating actions with synapses, but he needs a keyboard in order to play.

4.  Focused instruction must be supplied.  People play instruments by ear, but at some level will need exploration of possibilities and, if they are relating to an audience, education considering other people’s ears.

5.  Actions need to be received, understood, and supported with attention.  Human behavior is always a matter of reciprocity.  Disregard, misunderstanding, punishment rather than appreciation, will not end behavior if it reinforces contempt.  But “anything goes” doesn’t lead to successful actions either, except by chance or if the individual has his own code and feedback loops.  And it can also cause contempt, to say nothing of confusion.

So now, another way of asking why do people do bad things?

First, what’s considered bad and who defines it and why?  Defecating in public is accepted in India, they say.  (A problem just being addressed now.)  In this country defecating or urination by children is considered “harmless” by some people who will let a small child pee in, say, a parking lot.  Men urinate much more freely than women.  (There are not pissoirs in Paris for women, are there?)  Dogs go where they will, but try to use other people's places to keep their own yards clean.

This is bad for aesthetic reasons (it stinks) and for health reasons, but done anyway because it is more convenient, or because there are no proper facilities, or because of poverty that will keep street people out of indoor bathrooms, or because of pay toilets (I remember them and was impressed by the idea of pay toilets not based on entry, but on exit -- if you don’t feed the right coins into the mechanism, you’re trapped.) or because no one wants to clean public toilets.  It creates special “low” classes.

There’s another dimension which is based partly on the presumed privacy and separation of the sexes and partly on association of elimination with sexuality.  Both the product and the act can become sexualized.  Or the sequestration traditional for the act can become a conveniently secret place for illicit or violent behavior.

There’s a strange cultural shift now towards using baby words (poo) for the old Anglo-saxon offensive words (shit) and towards unisex bathrooms in spite of an opposite push towards gender-appropriate bathrooms and gender-appropriate proportions between the two kinds of bathroom because it takes a longer time for females to pee (a word my mother forbade) and lines can become so long for women that they desperately use male facilities.  Then there is the need for accommodations for people in wheelchairs and for children.  

Most confusing of all, there are now people who are changing genders so that they look one way, but need appliances that are another way, and might not fit the cultural assumption of who belongs.  I used to alarm other women when I wore my animal control deputy sheriff uniform into bathrooms because the assumption was that such a role was male.  At seminary there were never enough female bathrooms because the assumption was that the only female who would be on the premises would be the secretary.  

This discussion is helpful as an example because it involves gender differences and age differences, which are exceptionally likely to change in the way the culture looks at them and then prompt changes in the built environment or legal standards in order to respond to the needs.  Race is another issue.  A certain amount of Obstinacy, Defiance, and cold plotting goes into changing the situation, as well as episodes of emotional and possibly over-the-top behavior.  To some people this is sinful, breaking the rules, and to others it is evil, pointing to violence and sexual transgression.  

It's clear that the world is constantly shifting in many ways and that attempts to suppress and control -- either the shifts themselves or the response to the shifts -- are forces for stability in the best interpretation.  But if the response is disproportionate (an Obama word -- a concept he defends and a good description of the way some sections of our culture react to him) then it can become immoral and inhuman, like the black boy electrocuted for beating to death two white women though he was so small that in the electric chair he had to sit on a phone book
.

A person accused of Obstinate Defiance might be a terrorist (Is there anything more defiant than self-destruction?  I would say yes -- the forcible prevention of self-destruction.) or might be a child in a state of uproar because of abuse or because they are pressed to do something they can’t or because they are prevented from doing something they really NEED to do.  Some people look out at a world of boxes with labels and don’t see any place where they are named, much less fit into any system of pigeonholes, which is the basic premise of much bureaucracy.  A friend of mine was consulted by a teenager who trusted him and needed to know whether he were schizophrenic, because maybe he fit into that box.  Is such a box helpful or an anchor around his neck in a world that requires us to swim?

A human being has a life of a certain length, which is unpredictable.  Whatever tends towards survival should not destroy the quality of that life just for the sake of longevity.  Nor should it diminish the lives of others.  Those principles don’t need to be codified in laws -- they can guide us through our reflections.  As for the “mad dogs” among human animals, no code nor punishment nor classification will help.  But far more often they are on the authority end rather than the defiant end of the equation.  This is because power protects them from the winnowing of  time -- for a while.  Sooner or later Cheney's Obstinate Defiance will cut him down.

Cheney

This link is to a wise reflection by a judge in Calgary who has dealt with aboriginal people -- a different worldview -- for many years and has learned from it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq3a5CgBgqE

UNDERSTANDING OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE BROADLY

Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which was originally defined to describe kids who defy any kind of authority, is now being applied to adults who are being defiant.  Of course, that’s pejorative, implying that the disobedient are simply not yet adult, unreconciled to the kinds of compromises every adult must make.  And it also carries the diagnostic stigma that one is “crazy.”  

I have two cats, both female, womb-mates, now aging.  The yellow one is mellow, a cuddler, a sleeper, a treat-eater, rather stupid.  The tortoise shell is a living example of ODD.  When she was little, she ignored her own name unless I threw a slipper at her to get her attention.  I thought she was deaf.  I’m saying that ODD must have some kind of physical basis.  Maybe it is more of a failure to be domesticated than it is immaturity or psychosis.

Here’s a story about the genetic basis of domestication in cats.  http://allday.com/post/1458-how-the-cat-went-from-wild-beast-to-domestic-object-of-adoration

I’ll summarize:   Thirteen genes changed as cats became domestic.  They include changes in the genes controlling memory, fear-conditioning, and stimulus-reward (operant conditioning).  Five genes influence development by neural crest cells, which affect skull shape and coat color, but they also have impact on the whole body.  (A round head that fits into a human hand is appealing.  Temperament in cats is often related to coat color.  Also, the fourth-leg on the gender chromosome X carries a color which is why tri-colored cats are always female.)

Some genes were changed by diet, esp. an adaptation that dropped whatever it is that processes fats in hyper-carnivorous diets and maybe added lactose-tolerance to adult cats, parallel to the same adaptation in humans using dairy sources as food.  But also a dulling of sense of smell, in contrast to dogs.  It seems associated with the disinclination to hunt.  Why eat a mouse if you don't have to?

“Even though the smoking gun genome is found in the DNA of cats, scientists are also considering how it may apply to the domestication of a host of other mammals including dogs, cows, pigs and even humans. The reason for comparisons, particularly to humans, and their furry pets is that the structure of cat chromosomes more closely resembles that of homo sapiens — even more so than dog's DNA.” 

Crackers and Squibs

Having raised a series of bobcats, I can attest to both the similarities and the radical difference between wild and domesticated cats, especially after adolescence when the bobcats left if they could, looking for their own place in the world.  In general, the bobcat kits were far more ODD.   They just didn't care about humans that much.  But even the bobcats were not alike.  The littermates “Rufus” and “Gimpy” were as different from each other in temperament as my present Mellow Yellow and ODD Tortie domestics.

Colonel Przewalski's never-domesticated horses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/1318590/When-wild-horses-were-dragged-into-domesticity.html  is one among many recent articles exploring the genetic basis of domesticated horses.  Of course, you’ll remember that ALL American horses are feral, domestics gone wild, so their genome needs to be compared with those of Asian wild horses like Colonel Przewalski’s plus DNA from ancient bones.  This article suggests that feral and domestic horse genomes prove to have many sources as shown in matrilineal lines, but comparisons with early horse genes do turn up the evidence of change in the direction of domestic usefulness.

The race horse veterinarian, Sid Gustafson, points out that horses are pack animals, like wolves, but cats are not.  If an animal has the genes for participation in a society, a group, then they are more easily domesticated because they let the humans become their herd and are reciprocated by inclusion in the human “family.”  A pack trip integrates both horses and people.

Sid Gustafson family trip

Roy Rappaport defines survival as relating to the individual as well as being for the group, and the balance between the two -- individual versus group -- may sacrifice one or other.  Individuals die in wars for the sake of survival by groups.  Sometimes individuals may destroy whole groups, as Hitler attempted.  His justification for extinguishing a “race/religion” was supposedly genetic, but the real problem was that he himself didn’t belong.  He was a killer in search of ingratiation with the German people by inventing a common enemy and then eliminating it.  The old triangulation strategy.

So for an individual trying to solve a relationship that interferes with either the survival of themselves as individuals or the survival of the larger group, it is in a sense a problem of domestication, "who ya gonna throw in with."  Strategy by affiliation.  Mammals (so undoubtedly humans as well) have at least some basis in their genomes for belonging to a specific group which develops in response to a specific environment, but also is shaped by life history.

Then, given the nature of the particular infant, the success of maturation depends on the interface with the parents and larger culture.  Terry Brazelton, the pediatrician, has insights into this.  http://www.touchpointsbook.com/touchpoints.html  If baby and culture are a pretty good match and if people are sensible about adjusting strategies, things turn out very well.  But a quiet baby will have trouble with a hyperactive overachieving mother, and a vigorous, seeking baby will struggle with a passive or confining mother.

I propose that an oppositionally defiant child was probably misfitted as an infant -- forced to be on a schedule that wasn't in sync with the baby or ignored when needs were pressing.  (I don't just blame Mom.  She may have been as trapped by culture as the baby.)  The lesson such a baby may have learned is that you have to take care of yourself as you can, maybe by making a big fuss and maybe by hiding.  Sometimes everything was fine until there was a distressing change and since babies can’t really understand the causes, they can only do the freeze, flight, fight things that are hard-wired into mammals as a matter of survival.  But clumsily, since they are babies and without consciousness or memory.

At about age three or four, children try to help and comfort others, esp. their parents.  They try to be parents themselves and in cases where the parents are more like children than the children, they sometimes really do help.  I’ve never forgotten the woman who had passed out and whose toddler had brought her a blanket and a glass of water, then settled down beside her to keep vigil.  I’m sure it is a tableau that repeats.  Someone must have done that for the child.  But many people will try to parent their parents through their whole lives.  Of course, teenagers think their parents are incompetent anyway.  And humans try to parent their domestic animals.  Parenting per se is a spectrum of behavior, not one thing.

Being stubborn in defense of vulnerability is a moral sort of defiance.

There has been a lot of cultural fuss about the death of the Big Papa in the Sky, God.  In a good seminary or divinity school, equal attention is paid to the nature of human beings.  This is religious anthropology and it soon becomes obvious that human and “god” are reciprocal concepts.  It also becomes obvious that “god” concepts get captured into the service of hierarchical authorities who claim privilege in their relationship with this constructed idea.  One who is ODD is defined as an heretic and may even risk being burned at the stake.  

The commodified, internationally controlling corporations of our present society have made a religion of patriotism, product loyalty, and strategic ignorance as the price of survival.  Posing as parental, they grind up individuals.  Like tanks they threaten to crush the defiant for the good of the whole.  The man who stands in front of the tank is acting out moral ODD.  Most analysts of obstinacy neglect the moral dimension.

What practical things could a defiant person do to survive as an individual, perhaps in service to the survival of the group?  Here are some early ideas, pretty general.

1.  Find or create a niche where the individual is protected.  (Monasteries?)

2.  Assume a disguise.  (Guy Fawkes masks)

3.  Make yourself exceedingly valuable with a major skill.

4.  Go to an edge and live in solitude. (Me)

5.  Find a powerful protector.

6.  Make an enduring record that will survive. (Arts)

7,  Make common cause with many others.

8,  Protect the even more vulnerable -- maybe not human, maybe the planet.

9.  Good health.

10.  Know stuff, including skills.
11.  Focus.  
12.  Analyze yourself bravely but not mercilessly.

This is a confused post because I am still confused.  Why is ODD -- Oppositional Defiance considered "aggressive"?  If it is resistance to authority figures, why isn't it the authority figures who are the aggressors?  It seems the word "disorder" is a tip-off to authoritarian motivation, esp. cops, but it triggers something like "obsessive control syndrome" which justifies the use of suppressing violence even to the point of death.  THAT's aggressive.