We have a twenty five pound black male cat. He’s odd, but to be honest I have yet to meet a cat that isn’t. He’s a bit on the chunky side, but he’s large to begin with, and so his stature isn’t entirely due to domestication and food access. Lately he’s been demonstrating his oddity by training me to have a mid-morning nap with him, and it’s both peculiar and annoying.
I’m retired and so I’ve been trying to sort out how to work a nap into my every day routine. A person would think that incorporating a daily siesta wouldn’t be a challenging hurdle to climb over each day, but I’m struggling to make it work. I think that part of the problem is timing. Every day is a little different activity wise, and the night before is always a moving target as far as how long I delay before actually calling it a night. I think that perhaps guilt is as large a problem as schedule. For some reason I can’t completely shake off years of no naps, and an afternoon snooze hasn’t been as welcoming as I’d anticipated. I drift in and out because I feel almost censurable, for wasting daylight I guess.
Anyway, the boy cat has somehow decided that he needs to herd me into going for a nap with him. Cats appear to show no signs of guilt over sleep at any time or of any duration. This makes sense when you consider that the same feline mentality shows no remorse over indiscriminate slaughter, so a cat nap or two isn’t going to affect their mental health. He can’t talk obviously, but I’ve sorted out his body language and recognize the signs. He comes and finds me and stares intently at me from three or four feet away. Then when I inquire of what he might want, he moves quickly to a standing position with his tail and ears raised, and while looking over his shoulder takes three or four quick steps towards the downstairs bed.
Then my wife joins him in making me feel guilty, and I’m sad to say that I actually go and tuck the asshole cat in. Twenty minutes or so later and after a head rub and a shitload of purring, I get up and he sleeps for a few hours.
So I was wondering why he behaves the way he does. Cats have a different perspective on the world than we do, and part of the reason for that is sensory and part of it is priority. However it seems to me that their sensory apparatus is designed to address their priorities, and that the impetus for their behavior is almost exclusively to manage vulnerability. Sleeping with me makes him feel safer and he can relax. Food is another vulnerability in animals, and humans have been exploiting that vulnerability forever. The effective exploitation from having animal sustenance readily available has enabled us to ride horses, and get cows, pigs and chickens to stay close to us until they’re ready to be consumed. Or milked and egged if that’s your preference. You just need to feed them with consistency.
And that’s how we get bacon and eggs. By exploiting the food vulnerability of animals that are favorable and flavorable. And if we’re looking for an example of the power of food vulnerability, then consider the fact that cows will hang around with us even though we’re their most prolific predator.
So while I was contemplating feline behavior it occurred to me that people aren’t much different than animals in that our conduct is also very much driven by managing our vulnerabilities. We have different tools to use in the assessment and management of those liabilities, but I think that if you want to predict a person’s behavior in any given situation, that it would be wise to pay particular attention to any vulnerabilities they may possess. Real or perceived, hidden or obvious, those weaknesses guide decisions and ultimately behavior.
Assessing a person’s vulnerabilities can be a difficult undertaking though, because humans go to great lengths to hide our flaws. The instinct to obscure weakness or fault is sort of a two pronged fork and both prongs produce a version of vulnerability. Prong number one is rooted in survivability. Prong number two is camouflage to avoid responsibility for an error in judgement or action. In prong one the subject in question feels vulnerable to either physical injury or hastened termination, and it’s vital to not expose those vulnerabilities to the entity wishing to cause you harm. This practice is imperative because our adversaries are constantly probing for susceptibilities they can exploit. In fact, any competent strategy of competition from hockey to armed conflict requires identification and exploitation of your rivals shortcomings. So, we instinctively hide our deficiencies because Achilles heels are best not showcased when facing archers, either in reality or metaphorically.
Prong two cloaking is focused on avoiding the mental duress from humiliation, and the inconvenience of having to provide inane recriminations. Essentially creating a smoke screen of noise and absurd accusations to deflect from your faulty action or logic.
A prong two example is in order I think.
If you go on YouTube and search road rage you’ll quickly come across what I’m talking about. A fender bender occurs, and the dash cam shows clearly that a non-signaling vehicle changing lanes didn’t see the other vehicle right beside them, and they caused an accident. For some strange reason, the driver that caused the accident then extracts themselves from their vehicle and starts Karen screaming at the person they ran into, or sometimes they just drive away and pretend that nothing happened.
Both actions are vulnerability reactions, and its actually amazing how often fight or flight responses occur when a grown up my bad and an exchange of insurance details will resolve the immediate problem.
Prong one makes sense. Prong two often doesn’t, and yet examples abound where we’re caught red handed, pants down, hand in the cookie jar, and our instinctive reaction is to lose our shit, and attack the person that pointed out our malfeasance.
And we do this because we feel vulnerable. Someone has challenged our actions and we don’t have a morally sufficient rationalization to offer, and so we attack the person or persons that are causing us to feel disempowered.
And I think that crazy assed politics from Nazi’s to MAGA is fueled by people who feel oppressed and powerless. I have a really hard time believing that The Donald has the capacity to intellectually grasp the depth and intricacies of the group vulnerability that currently enthralls his MAGA faction, but he has assuredly ridden a grievance wave fueled by his followers insecurities. Adolph on the other hand, had the after effects of the Treaty of Versailles which was basically a road map for world war two.
American conservative and MAGA vulnerabilities are much harder to discern than hungry unemployed and humiliated Germans. No one is wheeling a wheelbarrow of Washingtons and Jeffersons to Macdonalds for a supersized Quarter Pounder meal, but for some reason or reasons the Amagacans are prepared to throw away their democracy and put a psychological aberrant in charge, because they believe he will somehow make them feel less vulnerable.
So, it appears that the MAGA insecurities need to be addressed, and that’s a daunting prospect when they won’t admit they have any. I think that the difficulty is that the root cause of MAGA vulnerability is challenging to elucidate without one of those hand in the till moments I referred to earlier. Admitting that your grievance is fear of a skin tone or a gender is morally dubious and might not be well received, and so they attack instead of defending the indefensible.
Somehow agent orange and his attack dogs at Fox and in Congress have transformed themselves into Republikarens, and the MAGA faithful have followed the leader. So now they’ve devolved to a pack mentality where indiscriminately attacking anyone without a red hat is standard operating procedure. It’s the road rage scenario incarnate. It’s like causing an insurrection and then blaming Nancy Pelosi for it.
So what are these MAGA vulnerabilities?
I’ve listened to as many of the red hatters as I can tolerate and I’ve concluded that their grievances are not that complicated. They fear their transition to a minority. For generations the Amagacans have disparaged minorities in person and in policy, and now they find themselves becoming that which they have maligned. I must say though that their hostility for all things associated with minorities hasn’t impacted the Republlikarens from co-opting victimization.
Which is sort of confusing, because from where I sit the embrace of victimhood is an affirmation of minority status. So, it’s a behavior that confirms a status that they’re trying to avoid.
The Amagacans fear the replacement theory, and they didn’t need some white winger to describe it to them. They can feel and see themselves becoming less consequential all the time and it’s making them traffic accident mental. They can see it when Muslim congresswomen are vilified on Hannity. They can hear it when Spanish is spoken at Cinco De Mayo events from Houston to Tucson. They can see it with every commercial and television show where gay people are featured.
And it’s making them traffic accident nuts.
In reality though, the replacement theory is actually a displacement theory. They’re being moved from a position of assumed superiority, and realizing that a more evened field of competition isn’t working out quite like they expected.
Black Nascar drivers and openly gay politicians with the word butt in their last name? Sweet Jesus what’s happening to America?
And their vulnerabilities make them take Marjorie seriously as she rants about American family values after extracting herself from her yoga instructors penis.
And it means they’re willing to elect a dicktator, because they believe he can somehow reinstate their preferred status, and eliminate their feeling of vulnerability. Just like the good old days when America was great.
For them.