This piece is in 4 parts, in two formats. Part 1, 3 & 4 are Stefan’s blue screen presentation method where we see him at his best, narrating fact after fact in a slow, soft, lucid manner. Stefan is at his worst when doing his biweekly call-in shows, which I will not even watch. He’s one of those predatory nerds who can’t help picking on the mentally weak.
The meat of the show is his conversation in Part 2 with a Doctor Feletti, from Kaiser Permanente, who is involved in the ACE study with the CDC. ACE is an acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences, from being beaten and raped to finding your father’s body before breakfast. There is so much information it is hard to process. The best part of the conversation was atheist Stefan biting his tongue when the doctor suggested that catholic confessional had some psychological benefit!
Doctor Feletti defines much of self-destructive behavior in humans as ‘unconsciously attempted solutions’, and describes addiction as being hard to resist because ‘it is hard to get enough of something that almost works.’ His most touching discussion was on weight loss problems among women who have been raped, who intentionally and subconsciously pull out of successful programs when they begin to fear that being more attractive will make them a target for more rape. The study was conducted with over 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patients and did not provide therapy. The most troubling aspect is that such high numbers of messed up adults show up in an upper middleclass population.
The most surprising finding was that a 2 to 3 minute conversation with a doctor about childhood abuse or rape, resulted in a 35% reduction of health complaints, but that this effect wore off after 2 years. Stefan is a therapy crusader and tried to drive the doctor into uncharted assumptions. But the doctor remained objective and simply pointed out the catholic confessional example, and suggested that if these people had a non-judgmental spouse or relative that they could speak with for a few minutes a year they would be much better off. This reminded me of the many participants in my violence study who sought me out as a listener, to unburden themselves of some of their pain. He discussed this as ‘the price of silence’.
The Doctor also freely suggested that his very company would be reluctant to act on these findings for administrative reasons! Below are some facts skimmed from this wealth of information about the messed up minds around us.
1. 90% of the human brain develops in the first 4 years of life.
2. Victims of childhood trauma have different cerebral structures as seen on brain scans.
3. 2 out of every 3 British mothers admit to hitting their infants! Hitting babies? If I were tyrant I would throw all of these women into American prisons to be the playthings of male gangs.
4. 78.5% of child abuse is by parents.
5. In the UK 2 out of every 3 girls and 1 out of every 3 boys are abused.
6. A significant rate of Adverse Childhood Experiences is considered 5 or more [a remembered spanking counts]. The victims of significant ACEs are generally ten times more likely to be obese, smoke, drink, do drugs, be violent, be poor employees, etc.
7. Victims of significant ACEs have a 20 years shorter lifespan than the rest of us, because all of this stuff adds up.
8. ‘Meth’, our most virulent street drug, was the first anti-depressant prescribed in the early 1960s. Thanks Doc!
9. In underdeveloped nations poverty is an indicator of starvation.
10. In the U.S. and other developed countries poverty is an indicator of obesity.
11. Women are 50% more likely to have significant ACEs [which Stefan had to choke on as he is an anti-feminist and this finding messes with his agenda].
12. There is no data like this for poor populations, but it is assumed that higher levels of ACEs are present among the poor.
13. There is zero evidence that ACEs have lessened over the course of the 20th Century.
14. And finally, what the point of this 4-point program, The Bomb in The Brain, comes to, is the fact that 1 in every 3 human males has a gene that will result in them developing a violent pattern of behavior in response to ACE. That’s right parents, keep beating your kids so that my grandson can write Harm City 2100.
I would like to make one final note here. I have read over 200 books on the American Frontier experience, focusing on the interaction of the Natives and the European invaders. The thing that bothered the Indians the most about Europeans was how badly they treated their children [note the majority of brutal bitches among British mums indicated by ‘3’ above]. For you who think this makes for tougher men recall that a roughly 20-1 numerical superiority and vast technological superiority, was required for European victory over Native warriors. The most telling indication that there is something really creepy about how European children have traditionally been raised is that when people who had been abducted and then adopted by Natives had a chance to rejoin white society, they usually did not. The Shawnee general Blue Jacket was a runaway white kid!
As a poor kid once told me, “Grownups suck.”
