I spend a lot of time researching behavioural science and mental illness, because it's something that I've had to live under for 33+ years, and also because it is a particularly underutilized resource in our world.

Or so I once thought. In fact, behavioural injury is perhaps the most overutilized weapon in our culture, currently; so understanding it is key to understanding the big picture. So, without further ado, how to achieve behavioural injury in one easy step.

Step One: Wake up in America.

You weren't expecting that, were you? For it to be so easy that all you have to do is open your eyes. Well it is... worse yet, it is inescapable. It is the entire paradigm in which we live. And that's a problem.

Back last summer, on the day of the Great Solar Eclipse of 2017 (a very special day for me, which I'll explain at another time.) a friend of mine on Google+ made a post of giddy exhaustion... she was completely blissed out, just thoroughly cooked by the experience. The majesty, the power, the indescribable wonder of seeing an astrological event of such magnitude with her naked eyes that she then posted about sharing such an experience with her husband, her town and the world.

I couldn't bear to do it. To burst her bubble and inform her that less than 1% of the planet beheld totality. That for the vast majority of species on Earth, it was simply Wednesday.

America: Subject of much Hyperbole

Unfortunately, most Americans labour under the delusion (forcefed to them from birth) that the entire human species is just like Americans. Vain, self-centered, shallow, vindictive, entitled; generally an all around shithead. And it simply isn't that way.

If you feel a bit insulted that I just called the "Greatest Nation on Earth" a festering mass of shitheads, well.. I was forcefed American Exceptionalism from birth as well. So were the people who fed it to me.

Folks ain't like this in the rest of the world. Seriously, they aren't. The mass media controls the majority of the narrative that we, as media consumers, see and hear every day; but try to remember that there are places on Earth that hold a radically different system of valuation than we do.

In America, particularly due to the rise of Consumer Culture in the 50's, all valuation is based on $$$. All objects are evaluated as a resource for monetary exploitation, and being as objects are considered to have more extrinsic value than people, all people (human or otherwise) are reflexively objectified, in our culture, as a matter of course. This is the basis of the American model of economic and resource management; a fundamental block of our day-to-day behavioural reality, or paradigm, for short. Case in point:

Carousel Begins.

If you're an American, you're probably either salivating, secretly-salivating, less offended than you admit, or considering showing ol' Yestermorrow what a real set of boobs looks like (this is highly encouraged, by the way...)

But in any case, this is a fine example of how American valuation works. A ladies' "objective" value largely correlates to her reproductive potential, most easily evaluated by visual review. If my rather blase' approach to "objectification" causes dissonance, well get used to it. This ain't the breakfast bar.

Or is it?

Why this is important: Because simply put, Americans have a hyperbolic breast fetish. One which we reflexively project onto the entirety of the Earth, and then judge them on.

Way back when I was 15, a pro-wrestler I knew told me all about how Europeans and South Americans broadcast breasts on regular television channels (the horror!) and how they were all moral degenerates for doing so.

My immediate thoughts were: A: Gods bless them all, and B: Defect at first possible opportunity.

Yet the truth of the matter is, those people are not the moral degenerates... We are, because we so quickly attribute a sexual context to EVERYTHING.

Seriously, in a vast number of cultures, breasts are just as extraordinary as belly-buttons. Everybody's got 'em. And these cultures laugh at us. One of those cultures is only 150 million Americans-strong. For real, to a certain point, women find it humorous that "The Greatest Nation on Earth" wets it's pants everytime a lady takes her top off. Which is pretty damn funny, ya gotta admit.

But in the USA, breasts are still treated like the end of the world. To the detriment of all. Men, Women, Boys, Girls; everybody is devalued when a set of bodacious mammaries is reduced to an objective resource in itself. I'll be going into precisely the behavioural mechanism and divine impact of this phenomenon in another post, but for now, just keep in mind this perspective:

While having an individual breast-fetish is all well and good (ahem) when such fetishization takes place on a cultural scale, IE: big enough to impact the behavioural paradigm; it becomes a weapon.

One which is being wielded, against us, on a femto-hourly basis. And one that is far more terrifying (in a Evokreationary sense) than it's wielder's could possibly imagine.

The devil made me post those, I checked it on Snopes... ;)

Gentility to the Gentle,

Silas Danois