which frankly is one of the most terrifying things i've ever heard and really put the entire history of human civilization in a new light. this has been haunting me, honestly
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one way the trauma system might update, which might have happened all the time to premodern humans, is if one day you cried a lot about how much your dad beat you. but maybe your dad also beat you for crying, and now that healthy trauma processing is cut off
so it's possible to not only have a primary trauma but to have secondary traumas that make it harder to clear the primary trauma. now factor in the fact that your stern dad was himself beaten by his dad, etc. etc. (plus the effect of e.g. wartime PTSD)
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@DougTataryn talks about the modern world having "cultural alexithymia" - a widespread lack of emotional awareness, of exactly the sort you would need to understand and process trauma-like stuff -
so now imagine that the trauma-optimized memetic payload is like - do these things and not these other things - punish people for not conforming - punish people for expressing negative emotions about these memes
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I think it might be even worse than this. What if there's no meaningful distinction between a trauma and a learning-based-on-something-painful? A 2-year-old's tantrum expresses authentic rage born of suffering. A 2yo will have a thousand such transient traumas.
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This means every iota of "culture" is painfully carved into the growing being, even including the parts of culture that say "don't bash your sister in the face because she stole your sippy cup".
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