Micro-scale Cognitive Development is Reflected in Macro-scale Cultural Progress

This is a theory I've been churning over in my mind for a while now.  Like most of my theories, it is correct.  Forgive my arrogance; I do not believe in false humility.

Micro-scale psychological development in a human mortal's lifetime is reflected in macro-scale cultural/civilization progress.

There exist phases of civilization, also known as macro-scale collective consciousness, that are reflected in any given human's lifespan on a micro-scale. The older and more advanced a civilization is, the more it displays grown-up, responsible sensible behavior.  A more evolved civilization houses citizens that have better logic and reasoning capabilities, as well as empathy and compassion.

You've heard of the theory of collective consciousness?  An entire culture or nation can grow, and there will be a superimposed consciousness, or a train of thought pattern that will start to develop.  Sociologists and anthropologists talk about the collective consciousness of China, for example.  Supposedly, they all seem to be of one mind, not a whole lot of individualism going on, yada yada.

There are three major distinct phases in a human's life and cognitive development.  We shall briefly review them first.

1)  Infancy/childhood;

Children are naturally inquisitive.  They are curious, they want to learn about the world around them, and they are fascinated by everything.  They want to explore and discover.  You will notice that if it is a good kid who is kind and intelligent, they want to help do things.  This applies for boys and girls both.  They can thrive in this environment, with this behavior, as long as the adults guide them within a framework of rules that keeps them safe.  Parents can encourage and cultivate this character that little children have, combined with implementation of rules.

2)  Rebellious adolescence;

This is the notorious phase, whereby the subject eschews all perceived authority in a bid to assert so-called independence.  They think that any authority is bad simply by dint of being the authority.  Individuals at this stage of mental development do not even know what they don't know.  They believe themselves to be learning from history, they believe themselves to be learning from their past mistakes and from others' past mistakes, when in fact they are not.  They also believe that they are trailblazers, renegades, revolutionaries, etc.  (Hehe, "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" has parodied this conceit.  Aunt Zelda once said, "Oh look, Hilda.  Sabrina is going through that charming, 'To assert my independence, I'm going to make myself as ugly as possible' phase.")

It should be noted that the rebellious stage is not necessarily limited to the teenage years.  Many people that are legally adults are still trapped in the same mindset of a teenager.  Not all, but many 21-year-olds and 22-year-olds are there with their kegstands, promiscuity, failing their exams, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, with their parents' co-signature paying for all of it.

3)  and Grown-up.

At this stage, individuals realize that all those societal rules and regulations, which had been imposed on them as children, were not just arbitrary.  They arrive at the revelation that those rules and societal mores were in fact upheld for good reason.  Lo and behold, parental enforcement of rules meant that parents cared enough to keep their child in full possession of all their limbs and extremities, while also fostering the child's curiosity.  Indeed, the rules that parents implemented for their teenage children also were for good reason.  When active, those rules had kept society whole, healthy, and functioning.  Often, these grown-ups are now wise enough to know that they should raise their own children in a similar manner.

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Here are the stages of civilizations as they are analogous to human psychology.

1)  Infancy/childhood:

Ancient civilizations took shape as a male-and-female two-person union stayed together with shared offspring they biologically produced.  Different members of the family took on specialized roles.  Ancient cultures became stabilized based upon a structure similar in concept, which extended to the greater community.  Specialized roles were delegated to those people who had natural affinity for them.  The earliest estimate of human settlements in ancient Asian cultures date as far back as ___

As people learned more about the natural world, they developed methods to utilize it to their advantage.  They devised techniques for manipulating the natural for their own well-being.  The learned to benefit their own medical health as well as their standard of living.  In many ways, they already had done this.  They graduated from being hunter-gatherers, who by definition could only depend on what already existed on the land.  Because of this, hunter-gatherers cannot secure anything beyond basal bare survival.

The citizens of these ancient cultures learned to become farmers and gardeners, who can work the land to their advantage.  They can settle on the same plot of land and can maximize both the usage of the land as well as their own work efforts.  They optimized farming, harvesting, and gardening efficiency to make full use of what the land offered to them.

Women's work, as you might have guessed, centered around the family, the hearth and the home.  Women flourished in their traditional roles of raising the children.  They took on the task of cooking food that provided essential nutrients including protein and fiber, flavoring it with healing spices that lowered blood pressure, improved circulation, and boosted the immune system.  Women were midwives, providing labor and delivery aid to a woman in the task of childbirth, which is tumultuous but upon which survival of the human species revolves.  Women prepared herbs, soaps, and distilled plants for healing, and they took care of the sick and the elderly.

The cultures of far east Asia as well as the Indian subcontinent are renowned for their many spices that have subtle pharmaceutical properties.  Ginger, cinnamon, also garlic, onions, turmeric, cumin, galangal, star anise, nutmeg, cloves.  (People in modern times sometimes complain about the aroma of Indian food, but the fact is that it is healhty.  So too is traditional Far East Asian cooking healthful.)  Rice was their staple carbohydrate crop rather than wheat or other gluten-based foods.  Their cooking methods and recipes fostered longevity.

So, women were heavily involved in nutrition, administering healing spices, and midwifery.  Women were also nagging and controlling and bossy, and made sure their families obliged.  (Admit it, ladies, that is how we are.)  They were the ones that primarily handled these responsibilities.  What does that translate into?  Medicine.  That's right, folks -- medicine has always been the bastion of women.   Women in ancient civilizations were the precursors to modern-day medical doctors.

It is annoying that so many liberals are offended by and livid about this fact that women were homemakers who nurtured and healed.  Libs are basically saying that women's contributions to society are unimportant.  They are saying that women's work is not worth anything unless it is identical to men's work.

The reverse angle is also true.  Men's work was equally as essential to the foundation of civilization.  Just because men did not "pitch in" and help women do the housework, does not mean their contributions should be ignored.  The menfolk did the primary amount of construction work.  This means they had to fashion equipment to obtain lumber, and they had to invent specialized tools to Two-parent family units were living indoors and were no longer relegated to surviving in mud huts and sleeping on the ground.  Men built the homes, and later on when the civilization became a little more developed, men built places of business, as well as schools.  Men also did much of the farming, driving cattle along the lands and tending to the crops.

Men were tasked with these jobs that required grueling labor, for the plain reason that they have more musculature and physical capability than women.  This is a fact, folks; there is no point in becoming offended over it.  Women did help with a lot of the planting and harvesting of crops.

Men paved the roads, and built infrastructure, and they founded small businesses.  They established early versions of commerce, by trading one man's expertise in metal smithing with another's expertise in hunting.  Bartering for goods and services gradually allowed for a standard of living to be sustained, with some rudimentary comforts of life such as furniture.  Whole new industries sprang up into being, such as the textile industry.  India and China were well-known for their beautiful, diaphanous silks and other fabrics.

Eventually in this environment that assured safety and stability, the people's cognitive abilities increased even further.  They began dabbling in more complex and abstract occupations of time, such as studying the natural sciences.  They produced theories that represented laws of the natural world, including physics and chemistry.  The viewed the sciences, that is, the theoretical study of the natural universe, as a sort of mysticism.

They developed holistic, homeopathic remedies to ailments; a well-known branch is Ayurvedic medicine.   They devised naturopathic herbal medicines.  The works cited do not mention women founding pharmacological treatments.  However, I find it very difficult to believe that women, who have a natural tendency to be nurturing caretakers, and would have to draw from this to take care of children and husbands, did not make any medicinal discoveries.  I am positive that women contributed a great deal to the culture's understanding of health maladies and the approach to healing.  The Asian cultures

They wove these intellectual disciplines together into aa [[[____]]] including philosophy.

The Asian cultures enjoyed artistic pursuits that might not have served any practical life-and-death purpose, other than to daydream and think and create.  Indian and Asian cultures are famous for their classical music including invention of musical instruments; their paintings, sculptures, and woven tapestries; their performing arts.  They decorated with bright, festive colors simply because it looked pretty.  There is the somewhat fanatic, excessive, mystifying pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses.  Whatever you religious or philosophical leanings, you have to admit this is certainly creative.  Their peculiar religious beliefs drove much of their visual and performing arts.  The Far East Asian cultures had brands of spirituality that were not centered around theism.  However, they still valued meditation and prayer, and they did believe in spirits or energies that circulate human consciousness.  Taoism and Shintoism, for example, were very much steeped in values of nourishing the soul.

Eventually Asian civilizations progressed to the point that they built post-secondary institutions of higher learning.  They began to devote so much time and effort to academic pursuits, that they decided it would behoove them to found institutions specifically for this purpose.  They did original research of a rudimentary sort.  They decided that they would need centers, that is, buildings in physical locations, where they could cultivate this [[drive, curiosity]]] complex thought patterns such as the scientific method.

Let us relate this information with what we know about the psychology and capacity of children.  Recall that children are healthiest, psychologically and physically, if they are allowed to learn and grow within a set of rules.  For example, if a child helps with cooking, the adult parent must supervise at all times.  The rules ensure that children are not harmed as they learn about the world.  The need for protection from harm serves a twofold purpose:  one, obviously it protects the child from harm, and two, the child will be encouraged to continue to learn and grow.  If a child feels secure and safe enough, they will then be free to think and dream and create.  They might start drawing or painting, or writing poems, or playing dress-up.

Now back to the social rules of ancient civilizations that men and women followed.  Where did these "rules" originate?  What was regarded as the "authority?"  Answer:  instinct.  Both men and women are the children in this analogy.  This is because both halves of the human species followed these rules.  Women were healers, nurturers, and child-rearers.  Men were providers and protectors.  This instinct eventually came to be known as "tradition."

It needs to be emphasized that this is not the fake evpysch that pseudoscience-purveyors tried to foist on the unsuspecting public in the past.  These were not caveman days wherein males were promiscuous deadbeat abandoners or wmn were helpless single mothers that can't study math.

This is evpysch that truly pertains to growth of the human species and psychological peace of mind.  This is *social* evolution that genuinely denotes progress and does not kowtow to base biological urges.  This is where these traditions and inclinations originate.  THis theory draws from evolutionary psychology (the kind that revolves around improvement ansd is applicable to modern Homo sapiens), history, IQ and intelligence, and what we know about innovation and technology.

The reason those roles worked for the betterment of society is that the people performing those jobs were good at them.  Women had natural skills for healing and nurturing and, yes, nagging (which is very closely linked to medicine), owing to the fact that they have very complex physiology.  It was crucial for them to be well-versed in chemistry and nutrition and to be adept at fussing over people so that they could take care of their families and themselves.  Men excelled in their roles as business entrepreneurs, builders, and setting the groundwork for____  They had to take advantage of their natural gifts for developing the skilled labor trades, owing to the need to and providing for and protecting their families.

The citizens in those ancient civilizations probably did not know "why" they followed these societal roles.  They did not necessarily know the practical reasoning nor the abstract philosophy.  All they knew is that this worked to keep society in fairly good order, safe, and healthy.  This is why those cultures [[[____]]]]]]]]

This, too, has positive effects on society, for it fosters creativity.  This lays the groundwork for philosophy, for deep thought.

Let us look at an analogy that is closer to home.  Back when America was in its infancy, it actually flourished.  The economy grew, new trades and industries came into being.  This is because, like an infant's life, there were rigid structural rules placed on its behavior and conduct.  Businesses sprang up, medicine, scientific discovery, so much technological innovation.  The culture thrived.  If you read their scientific research literature, you will see that they were surprisingly non-ignorant.  They knew a lot more about microscopic as well as molecular biological processes than you would think.  Recall what I wrote earlier about women being natural doctors.  They were in fact the first doctors of medicine to be licensed in the United States.

The fields of science and technology underwent rapid [[improvements, changes,]]] evolutions of their own.  The 1800s were not primitive.  The people invented telephones, steam engines, electricity, photographic cameras, typewriters.  There was social pressure to conduct oneself with dignity and decorum at all times.  And people abided by this societal code because they thought this was the right thing to do.  People adhered to social mores because it was considered polite and civilized.  They knew instinctively that this was good for them and for their neighbors.

That was the norm from the nation's inception in the 1600s all the way up until about the mid-1950s.  Then the liberals with their woefully misguided social changes forced in an era of rebellion against any type of perceived authority.  Jack Kerouac, beatnik poetry, then the hippies in the 1960s, distaste towards working for a living, etc.  This leads us into the next phase.

2)  Rebellious adolescence:

Thus far this theory may be called Asian-centric.  When I write "may be called," this means "it is allowed" or "one has permission to," and not a euphemism for "it might be called."  This theory seems Asian-centric because it is.

During a long expanse of time, not a whole lot of noteworthy [[[things]]] came out of India or China.  Many modern-day scientists and historians have been scratching their heads over this puzzling phenomenon, including myself.  Both civilizations have the intellectual capacity to again flourish as centers of innovation, medicine, business, and trade.  Remember, IQ encompasses intelligence, empathy, morals, self-restraint, compassion, and the ability to organize.  This had been true throughout their ancient histories.  So what on earth happened?

Sometime in the slightly-less-ancient histories of Asia, somebody or possibly a group of somebodies must have decided that the traditional roles offered to men and women were stifling and undesirable.  They cast the so-totally-uncool rules of being family-oriented, goal-oriented, moral, and decent out into the river.  The women decided they wanted to stop being nurturing, much less taking care of their families.  Then men decided they wanted to stop being strong, much less protecting or providing for their families.  People began to break free from the social rules that evolutionary psychology had set forth for them.  They thought that they could simply discard the values and morals that were the fabric of society and held it intact for so long.  They thought they might be happier if they eschewed any semblance of order.  This has been the [[[main occurrence ]]] over the past several hundred years.  This was not a smart move.

That began the embarrassing timeframe during which social diseases popped up like weeds.  People threw themselves into many, many regrettable behaviors with gusto.  When I first learned about the sort of things that went down during a long stretch of time, I didn't even know how to react.

Sure, a lot of the Asian countries nowadays are third-world, violent, with trash strewn everywhere, and are the pickpocket capitals of the world...  But that's all that is happening, right?  Surely they did not have social problems culminating in ill-advised and downright abusive personal choices, like drug/alcohol addictions right and left, a nasty history of prostitution, or forced prostitution, i.e., ra--, pedophilia, venereal diseases, abortions, freebasing street drugs, sexual assault, murder and then dumping bodies in the river, gang activity, violent crime, women having no choice but to abort their growing fetuses, or unwanted carried-to-term babies being abandoned?  Right??

Unfortunately, it turns out they did.  Decadence always disintegrates into disrepair.  Just ask Babylon, the Roman Empire, and America on a miniature timescale in the 1930s.  And, just ask Asian countries.  The preposterously bad decisions had an annihilating impact on society.  This soon dissolved into a general, overwhelming, cross-continent dirge of malaise and apathy.  The absolute disintegration of people having any respect for themselves led to people losing respect for each other.  People lost personal morals and boundaries about basic things such as hygiene and a sense of privacy.  Forget family values.  What's the problem with shooting up heroin or catching syphilis when there's not a whole lot to live for?

These once-majestic cultures that invented mathematics and medicine in their ancient past, now don't even have running water reaching all corners of the map.  They do not have clean running water that one can safely drink straight out of the tap.  Nor do they have reliable, round-the-clock electricity with sufficient voltage.  Their regal history is now no more than an ancient long-forgotten legend, relegated to the arcane archives, merely a mythical, faded, spectre fae otherworld realm.

This abject disregard against structure and order, against the stable nuclear family unit, forced those civilizations to slip into the dregs, producing very few honorable___

If you could not tell, I am very proud of my Bengali-Asian ancestry.  I am proud of the nerdy Asian stereotype, I am proud of our culture and traditions, I am proud that my own immediate and extended family consider education to be one of the utmost priorities in life.  During my lifetime, I have known all stable Asian families wherein there were absolutely no drug addictions or vices.

When I found out that all the above mess lurked in the dark past of my ancestral homeland, I was disgusted.  "B-b-but we are Asian," I thought, "we are supposed to be smart, we are supposed to be wise, we have family values, we are supposed to be good people."

The Indian civilization fell into disrepair so dramatically that they stammered and rolled over dead when a completely foreign people from thousands of miles away happened to come along.  Those foreigners managed to topple over and rule the once-great land, within a mere few generations.

Why were the British even able to colonize Indian subcontinent <<at all>>??  This is the same land that had established some of the oldest universities on the planet.  This is the same land that bore philosophical [[[tribute, like a tribute to a person, for he's a jolly good fellow__]]]]]]]]

And yet for the longest time,  they could not organize themselves enough to cast off the silly palefaces that had delusions of grandeur.  Why did it take India nearly four hundred years to produce a leader who had the intelligence and the wherewithal to lead the nation back into independence?  Why were the people not able to band together for so long, as if they had forgotten the legendary empire they once were?

No European conquistadors even made it as far as China or the Far East.  And yet, still China hovered in the doldrums for hundreds of years.  The Chinese did not make many major contributions to human progress during recent history despite being a culture that is thousands of years old.  And despite the fact that said culture flourished way back in the day, very few major discoveries came out of China during more recent times.  Other than some pretty paper lanterns and the Dowager Empress, China was not known for making a whole lot of helpful technological breakthroughs during that time.  China was veritably left out of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.

Out of the Indian subcontinent, the most newsworthy attributes have been extreme poverty and violence.  Good god man, it was cringe-inducing when earlier this year I saw internet photos of dumped carcasses decaying and decomposing in the Ganges River.  Mercifully, at least those were pictures of murdered adults.  China has not fared much better with its horrible human rights violations.  The two biggest things to emerge out of China during this time period were communism and abortions.  India murdering baby girls; China murdering baby girls only earlier.  Other Asian countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, and Myanmar were sort of floating on rafts.  India and China, now in Anno Domini 2013, are still currently reeling from their rebellious adolescent eras.

So many scientific and historian pundits have demanded why the Chinese did not invent vaccines, transistor radios, or steam engines.  My only response before now was...  Ahm... I don't know.  I truly had no idea.  That is a really good question.  So I was left scratching my head, because I too was stymied.  [[[[mystified.]]]]]]]]

Let us look at where the civilization of America stands in this developmental [[progress___]]]]]].  It is important to note that currently America is not in its infancy, even though chronologically the established political nation-state of the United States is a very young country.  On the timeline of societal development, America is in the early stages of adolescence.  Obvious is the rebellious attitude, the refusal to listen to reason, evidence, or experience.  There is the pervasive notion that people want to do what they want to do, logic and consequences be damned.

Teenagers often experiment with rebellion against common decency, and with disregard for authority or wisdom.  They sometimes engage in behavior that is downright dangerous and self-destructive.  Just like a teenager, precisely *because* it is in its adolescence, America doesn't seem to realize that it is not learning from history.  It thinks it is learning and that that is why it is rebelling.  But then it turns out that that is not what's happening.  America is in fact repeating exactly what has happened, exactly what has come to pass before.  It thinks it is doing things differently, when in fact it is not.  The European nations are currently in a similar situation.

An individual human life is on a minuscule miniature ratio timescale.  Let me reiterate:  America is in its rebellious "teenage" era.  You will notice that an astounding number of individual persons in this society seem stuck in a perpetual adolescence.  This is despite the fact that age-wise they are legal, literal, old-enough adults.  This is true whether they are black or white, and even a very teeny tiny fraction of Asians have gotten thrown into the mix.  In terms of developmental milestones, they have not matured to the stage of realization where they are responsible for their own actions, nor have they progressed to awareness that actions have consequences.  They refuse to believe that they need to learn how to take care of themselves rather than assuming the government nanny state or other people's money has any obligation to provide for them.

3)  Grown-up:

Just a few short years ago, we began hearing a flurry of news reports about how China is a sleeping giant, and was now a slowly waking dragon.  This was about fifteen years ago.  Now more recently, we know that America is massively in the hole, in debt to China.  China is thus far being a very kind breed of lender, and has not yet called in for America to start repaying its loan amount.  The recent tech boom of India, that of computer programmers et al., is also well-known.]]]

This was all well and good, and this made me tremendously, unprecedentedly happy for those people.  Finally, at long last, my brethren and sistren are wising up and realizing that the abject poverty and hopelessness needs to stop.  But this still did not really make sense when considering that those cultures already had their golden age.  I shook my head in incredulity, for I was thinking, "Wait a minute.  This does not jive at all with my theory of civilizations rising and falling in cycles.  China and India already <had> their chance, they <had> their shot."  (Like "Ian Malcolm" opined about dinosaurs.)

How come they are suddenly, <now> of all things, <now> of all times, lifting themselves out of the doldrums?  After floundering for so long and forgetting the values of hard work, intellectualism, and morals that made their ancient civilizations great, now recently they realized that they need to get their act together.

This honestly makes no sense either.  It is a mystery to me.  It remained a mystery to me...  That is, until I thought about it a bit more profoundly, and reconsidered it in terms of a macro-scale that coincides with a human lifetime.  When framed within the context of what we know about human psychological development, the picture becomes very clear.

The Asian cultures have been in existence the longest of any on this planet.  Chinese civilization has been in existence for thousands of years.  Indian civilization has been in existence for thousands of years.  So it stands to reason that a culture with that extensive a history has already been thru all the epochal cycles.  Those populi have already experienced all the growth cycles that are messy and depressing, but which still happen on the path for a culture (or consciousness) to grow up.

It appears that they have finally seen the error of their ways.  They are now trying to redeem themselves.  They are trying to repair the havoc that was wrought due to generations and generations of spectacular, wanton disregard for tradition, or family values, or education, or medical health.  I am sure that a lot of Asian people have read the ancient history as well as the near-history of their cultures.  Either that or they subconsciously know that at some point in their history, rebellion nearly decimated their respective cultures.  That is precisely why they go to great lengths to distance themselves from that type of behavior.  They are too acutely aware of the severe social problems that have unfortunately reigned for almost half a millennium.  In this day and age, many educated modern families still do arranged marriages.  They often marry young, right out of college, presumably to cut down on the number of unwanted babies.

Look at the modern-day demographics of medical doctors, as well as PhD and Master degree holders as chemists, engineers, college professors in those fields of math and science, clinical lab specialists, biochemists, and physicists employed in this country.  They are disproportionately *overrepresented* by people of any Asian nationalities.  So we know for a fact that at least some of us Asians have the mental acumen necessary to be fluent in highly technical subjects.  They are pretty conservative socially and morally.  Any Asian kids growing up in this society are simultaneously exasperated by -and- secretly ever-grateful that their parents bugged them to study and work hard all their lives.

There are men as well as women who are doctors, engineers, economists.  When I discuss "traditional roles," I do not mean that women should only be pregnant housewives and aspire no greater than that.  Nor do I mean that only men should be allowed to work outside the homes or that they should be burdened with supporting the family alone.  I know many, many Bengali, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese women who are scientists -- clinical lab specialists, biochemists, microbiologists, computer programmers, histotechnologists, at least one industrial engineer.  ALL of the ones of the generation before my own are married, and together with their husbands they raised wonderful kids.  Many of the women chose to be stay-at-home moms during their children's formative years.  Essentially all of them are the archetypical fussy, overprotective Asian parents.

That is what I mean when I say "conservative."  These Asian families believe in success and in morals.  They have seamlessly reconciled conservative family values with education and professional development for both women and men.  They are oddly enough socially conservative.  Maybe they already went through that mess, realized that it didn't work, that it does in fact erode society and causes the foundation to collapse and crumble, and then decided to wise the eff up and resume normal society.

That is an excellent start.  At long last, we are back on the right path.  They are slowly now making their paths back to enlightenment.

reclaim its rightful post as a beacon of social evolution and progress.

Part 4:

Here is a surprise Easter egg.  This is a hidden little gift to you.  If anyone still does not entirely believe this theory, here is more proof.  Thus far we have covered the human history in terms of evolutionary psychology.  But what about evolutionary biology?

Before the Homo sapiens species, there were several precursor species that came before us on the evolutionary timeline of the entire span of living creatures on this planet.  Obviously, they cannot be counted allegorically as part of the developing human psyche.  But those are all still with merit.  What about all those branches of the evolutionary tree?  What possible analogy is there to those species-precursors within the human lifespan?  Excellent question.

Answer:  The developing human fetus.

I remember reviewing my introductory Biology notes several years ago.  I noticed that there were several parallels between the historical progression of single-celled organisms, evolving over billions of years into multicellular organisms, then into ever more complex species -And- the maturation process of the human fetus from zygote, to blastula, to ____.  The human fetus gradually passes through progressively more complex stages.

Even a neonate, infant, or very small child has psychological capacity, temperament, and intelligence quotient comparable to Cro-magnon.