oh, i forgot an important component, more specifically the claim (IIRC) is that one of the main ways a collection of cultural memes stays stable over time is by traumatizing its hosts into stifling their creativity so they don't fuck with the memes
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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)
@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
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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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Yeah, QC's summary here basically matches my sense. And you can see how this is a stable attractor in memetic evolution space. The attractor in which memes approximately don't evolve is one in which people can't innovate.
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[zooming in on crying] why would crying help? my understanding of crying is that it's a deep, hard-to-fake, signal of pain meant to draw attention from tribe members which implies that tribal security is what we actually need -- not sure how this fits into the trauma story
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focusing on crying here bc crying is the form of emotional processing that actually works, in my experience
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