QC

the main thing that feels iffy about this story is the fact that animals seem to experience trauma -- it doesn't seem to be particularly memetic

yeah, the whole fight-flight etc. system is already there in animals, i guess a better phrasing is that cultural memes take advantage of the existing trauma system to propagate among human hosts

so the trauma system is for holding onto escape/hide triggers which is (mostly) pointless for us weirdos living in non-violence but we still have trauma bc it got co-opted by parasitic memes? and so almost all trauma in weirdos is going to be bad??

so maybe instead of saying yes or no i'll try to elaborate on an example in more detail. let's say you had a stern conservative christian dad who beat you when you didn't obey him. your trauma system learns a trauma response to anything that feels like disobedience

the point of this response is to avoid beatings from your dad which is super super reasonable. but then, in the modern world, something funny happens: at some point you go to college and now nobody beats you anymore. unfortunately the trauma system does not update on this

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)

@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