I WANNA BE RE-GUSTED.

There is no evil, unless and until thinking makes it so.

We all know the thoughts and feelings we bundle up and label Revulsion and Disgust. Curiosity prompted me many moons ago to stand in two questions -- What is it that disgusts us? And who then is the author of that feeling?

Having de-energised a major portion of  what dis-gusts me (Middle French -- robs me of taste) I find myself swimming against a growing tide of social disgust swirling around me. And how is it, I wonder, that, in this present time as in the past, forces who seek to control and mobilise ordinary folks are able to so easily provoke fear and disgust to turn us against manufactured "enemies" and call it being "united"?

One of the things we do know is that revulsion (disgust) is a primitive, primary emotion arising deep inside the base of the brain -- that area of the limbic system that takes care of our most basic functions and primitive freeze-fight-or-flight reactions. Disgust's prehistoric purpose was to identify possible dangers to our survival and stop us from ingesting stuff that made our ancestors sick to death. Prehistoric beings without disgust tended to die. Stuff that disgusts us, we avoid and that avoidance helps keep us healthy. Well, that was the original purpose.....

But not for the first time, and probably not for the last, I find that something that started out as a good idea turns, somewhere along the way, to become toxic. That process is part of Evolution. Part of the evolution of our parallel aspects of becoming human, that biological/emotional mechanism we call "disgust" spreads from yucky substances to ideas, people and happenings we decide not to like, and seems to get adopted by default as we develop socially.

That's probably down to our families, carers and later friends and others we allow to influence us. In the name of Caring, these people deliberately tied our primitive "disgust" response to unrelated situations, ideas, beliefs, opinions, so-called "pests", and other people that they themselves had learned to react to with the tool of revulsion. Their dis-gust was conveyed not only by repeated mantras like "dirty" and "naughty", but also more subtly through feeling, meaningful looks, body language, and attitude. Most kids are incredibly sensitive to subtle reactions, and they respond in like manner because they want the approval of those offended. Kids may not know what's wrong, but they sense that something is "wrong". and they anxiously fall into line.

For the older beings, reacting with overt distaste is easier than looking more deeply into the situation and seeking more creative responses. Disgust is so dead-easy. With the kindest intentions from our elders, we were taught to dis-gust ourselves in order to protect us from perceived evil influences.

And I've found that my tick-tock reactions of disgust to situations, ideas and people that I find repugnant are not easy to let go of. Resorting to Reason won't do it. We didn't learn through reason to be offended or disgusted. No-one set us down and said to us "It's time we had a rational discussion about spiders/snakes/goo/ nose-picking/One Nation supporters...." We got into this powerless place emotionally, and that's the only effective way of reversing out again.

One of the most tenacious disgusts rooted deep in my ego is my repulsion against ultra conservative flat-earthers who go around disgusting over everything they feel challenged by. I find it really hard to keep my mouth shut. Odd isn't it? I was born into blue-ribbon conservative liberalism. These people used to be my tribe.

Conservative personalities are thought to have a considerably greater propensity to be disgusted than liberal personalities do. One illustrative study in 2011 found that people who were more physiologically disgusted, a reaction that was measured by skin reactions to a photo of a man eating a mouthful of worms were also more likely to self-identify as conservative. They were also more likely to have a negative response to what they see as too-radical social change – I've watched and experienced within myself this phenomenon many times in my life. 

I see it showing up right now in some reactions against current social-change issues like gay marriage, refugees and any cultures and religions that aren't "christian".

It appears that conservatives are wired to be a little more easily disgusted and fearful. They are a little bit more wired to defensiveness in an environment challenged by change. This is particularly apparent for sexual issues—not just gay marriage but for topics like paedophilia and pornography as well. And the more conservative they are, the more intense their reactions of fear and disgust.

But conservatives don't have it on their own. The same study also found that some liberal minds may also harbour implicit “revolted” associations. Our egos are no respecter of pigeonholes. If your ego has been so inclined by its prior conditioning, pretty much anything that can be labelled “abhorrent”, “an abomination”, “detestable”, “disgusting”, “distasteful”, “loathsome”, “objectionable”, “odious”, “repugnant”, or “repulsive” with a noticeable degrees of emotional energy and relish will meet with a wall of resistance, a lot of chest-thumping and yodeling, and an intellectual shut-down. I've heard, and seen these labels freely applied to neighbours who play their music too loud, refugees, and struggling farmers who see farming wind or coalseam gas as a means to survive government policies that have let them down. I've been guilty of attaching some of these labels to politicians whose choices and decisions I take umbrage at.

The disgusted ego is disgusted (i.e. avidly happy) to embrace and target anyone and anything – from broccoli to Daesh – regardless of race, creed, colour, ethics, politics or religion. There's no rhyme or reason to disgust. If we take a dislike to someone or something, disgust is always on hand to give us a justification for our dislike. But we won't go responsible for our disgust -- it's always the "other's" fault, isn't it?

It gets worse – the human ego being what it is, reactions such as disgust or pleasure can be transferred from one object to another by casual association. These associations are usually accidents of co-incidence, but they can, and are being objectively engineered by marketers, political parties, corporations to subjectively influence people toward their own ends.

In a recently published experiment, university researchers demonstrated that the presence of a distasteful element had some noticeable effect on the expression of totally unrelated social attitudes. Random samples of participants in the study were sorted into either an odour group (the researchers added a vomit-like smell to a room) or control groups (where no odour was injected). The participants were then asked about their feelings on an array of social and political issues. The results are clear: in the disgust (odourised) condition "participants exposed to the smell ... reported increased subjective disgust and more politically conservative attitudes concerning gay marriage, premarital sex, pornography, immigration, and Biblical truth." Interestingly, though, the disgusting odour had no impact on opinions on non-sexual political matters, such as tax cuts or energy prices.

This kind of disgust-by-association was used famously by the 1930s Nazis in engineering mass public attitudes towards Jews. Newsreels of Jews were intercut with revolting images of butchery, rotting corpses and flyblown meat. And if you think that kind of propaganda is dead, watch the nightly news on TV. Just tonight I saw an item on violence surrounding Donald Trump's rallies intercut with library footage of mob violence at other functions. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of D.Trump; I'm asking you to be more aware of how your perceptions are being manipulated, not only via juxtaposition of news items, but also in everything from commercials for deodorant to campaigns against violence to animals or how we "should" treat other humans.

Now, to get back to Professor Stewart's experiments on disgust, how can an odour change a person's political beliefs? It's best to think of it like this: The disgusting smell temporarily made the liberal minds more conservative, shifting the liberal attitudes to the right. In that more conservative state, the participants reacted more conservatively to tests that actually had nothing to do with smell.

I find this experiment interesting because I'm very curious whether the presence in the room of other people known to us can have an effect on how much disgust we'll reveal. Could our need to be liked or disliked by certain others change the behavioural form and intensity of the disgusted ego? Do we switch from satire to rant, or from mild, politically correct criticism to denunciation, depending on who's in the audience? I'm putting money on a “Yes” outcome. In fact, I strongly suspect that “political correctness” has come into vogue to save people from suffering the consequences of deeply felt Disgust. We don't say what we feel, nor do we mean what we say. Like most things human, it's a complex of the issue. "What we're finding here is that the environment plays a huge role," Stewart says. Conservative, ain't he?

In terms of biology and psychology, is the disgust one feels toward something objectively gross—like vomit—the same disgust that people might feel toward say, refugees, Muslims, Christians, politicians, paedophiles or gay people? Is it intrinsically the same emotion?

In terms of how you experience it biologically and psychologically? Yes. Disgust is disgust, regardless of what you pin it to. When we hook people up to psycho-physiological equipment, how they experience disgust in terms of activation of their sympathetic nervous system or what have you, it's very very similar. Which begs the question, is my present disgust really about this person, or am I targeting this person to avoid putting it where it really belongs -- somewhere in the past? The human mind makes associations between things and events, sometimes after rational deliberation and sometimes due to pure chance, and it thereafter cannot tell the difference.

Is there a direct cause/effect link between propensities to conservatism and disgust. I doubt that. As much as my disgusted ego would like to rant otherwise, I think it's a tie-up between disgust and pre-programmed Attitudes. Most of the research points towards disgust as an habitual reaction to one's conditioned (and conditioning) attitudes -- righteous viewpoints on sex-related policies: gay marriage, abortions, premarital sex, sex education in schools, paedophilia — those sorts of things. It's my suspicion that Attitudes are unconsciously allowed to influence where we classify people on the scale between the extreme ends of "conservative." and “liberal”.

As I said at the outset, we do know that disgust is a primitive, primary emotion. We also know, anecdotally at least, that the biological/emotional tool, along with anger, outrage and resentment seemed to get adopted by default as we expanded socially. 

Now, not unlike a lot of other primitive first-stage systems and strategies, what once ensured our survival in one context now threatens our survival in changed circumstances. History tells me that there's nothing more dangerous to survival than an inability to adapt and change, and I'm pushed to recall anything less conducive to adaptability than Disgust. It belongs more with truculent self-righteousness, and as a tool for survival, it's self-defeating. If something disgusts me, that's it. Any attempt to force me to override “my” disgust serves only to entrench it deeper. I'm burying myself deeper into my own grave.

We cannot yet be certain but one of the ways that this plays out is that people who have a strong disgusted ego, while claiming all rights to freely unload their opinions, at one and the same time tend to be in favour of tighter social and religious regulations of anything that might be construed as “individual freedom”. How crazy is that? Of course it's nuts. But in general it's my experience that if I scratch a righteous conservative, I find a bully -- in sanctimonious vestments. And bulling cloaks very frightened arch-conservatives.

Where does ideology come from?
Why are some people extreme liberals; why are some people arch conservatives at the other end of the axis? And ultimately, why are some people so self-identified with and attached to an ideology they claim to be “theirs” that they believe in it so much they will go to extreme lengths to support what is essentially an abstract belief system which, when you look into it, was inherited/adopted from others? They'll engage in arguments and acts that violate their own normal hierarchy of values, up to and including dishonesty and violence, some of it sparking revulsion in others?

Answer: Ego is the prime product of the social and family soup we showed up in. It is a given of the condition of being human. Extreme ascetics may free themselves of its influences to a point where it seems to no longer exist at all. But such people are rarer than hen's teeth, and they are the first to admit that they still have one.

We constructed an ego from the temperament we were born with, the environment, from the attitudes of those around to us, from our experiences of those elements, and our natural inclinations. Most of it was inculcated into us; some of it we picked up by osmosis. If you come from a good family of (say) liberals, you're raised in a particular culture, and surrounded and encouraged/discouraged by people with similar values, attitudes and priorities. You'll grow up leaning definitely to the right. Like fish in an aquarium, it's the surrounding environment you showed up in. In other words, we come into the world as political, social, ethical, moral and spiritual slates with very little written on them, and we soak up our attitudes and ideology from what's dished out to us by our primary carers and, later, from our conscious, chosen experiences as we respond to those early influences and make a way through life. Later in our development we may take a choice, at least for a while, to rebel and reject outright whatever we were brought up with and do whatever the opposite of that appears to us. Later we will probably knuckle under to our habited leanings. and create a persona that will, to the best of our knowing, take us to whatever experiences we think we want. Whatever path we choose, it's important to surrender to the reality that we are still a direct function of our raising, and our history is always perceived as proof that we're "right". Later still, we'll probably strike some sort of life crisis that forces us to realise that the persona we put together is not what we really are at all. At this point we hopefully find a way of breaking free of our past, dropping our belief that we are the Effect of an upbringing Cause. In so doing we create ourselves as the prime author of what happens from here onward. Using the lessons we've learned to this point, we deliberately undertake a more awareful reconstruction of our selves.

Disgust and Genetics?
Now, the burning question of the moment – could genes have anything to do with whether you are in favour of gay marriage, or letting Muslims into Australian citizenship -- or not?

Well, we now know that our attitudes, choices, decisions and actions affect our DNA – immediately. It's become uncomfortably plain that we cannot change a part of anything without causing change in The Whole, and that goes just as much for each of us individually as it does for us and the world at large. There's a big, long causal chain—there has to be—between your genetic information and your stance on stuff that really matters to you.

At this point what we believe is not that you have a gene for being for or against gay marriage or anything like that. But what you have is your brain, your central nervous system and your peripheral nervous system and what I can best describe as your soular plexus. These are processing systems. Within them, habit patterns of thinking, feeling and doing burn well-worn pathways into those systems. Your genes, influenced to some degree by your attitudes and behaviours, build and rebuild those information processing systems and make them more sensitive to certain environmental stimuli and less responsive to other environmental stimuli and that, in turn affects your attitudes and behaviours, and your autonomic reactions. Everything comes full-cycle.

This Ego thing evolved to help us get things started in answering the first big questions -- What am I? and How and where do I fit in to all of this? Ego also helps us avoid pathogens (things that are harmful to us). Unfortunately, the same system works to “disgust” us with social, psychological and grownup things that we feel to be threatening and so find a strong, un-reasonable. visceral aversion to. The feeling I get when I hear a politician openly lying is the same feeling I got when Mum gave me a cup of tea with a skin on it and bits of clotted cream floating on top. I gagged then, and I feel the same way now. That's how the crazy logic of an untrained ego works --- "This is the same as that, and that too, and maybe this too -- except sometimes. No wonder we find simply cranking up disgust much easier, and justifying it -- in terms of finding fault in the "other" -- even easier.

The good news is that the strong, causal chain between genetics and behaviour, while real, is not the whole truth -- not even nearly so. In every moment of our being we have the choice to break into that line of blame, question what we hope to gain from remaining attached to a victim attitude to "the past", and assume a here-and-now responsibility for making some changes. If you want to change what you've always been getting, start making some changes to what you've always been doing. Some personal intervening, evolving and reprogramming is called for to interrupt the tick-tock robotic stimulus/reaction habits.

For a grub to become a butterfly, some things have to die. For humans, the self-importance inherent in every form of Ego is one of those essential expendables.

Finally, I hope you noticed that I haven't used the words “right” or “wrong” about Ego. It's not what we are; it's just something we have, and we could not be human without it. I feel the same way about Disgust. As I've grown, disgust has morphed into something I call "divine pissed-off-ness", a powerful motivator to re-vision where I am now, let go of what got me here, move out of life's truckstop and get on with the journey I came for. If I can do that, so can you (unless you say "No")

By the way, how do I tell the difference between Disgust and Divine Pissed-Offness? The first induces a feeling of contraction and powerlessness; the second feels expansive and reveals possibilities for directed action.

My guess is that an essential part of this game is – not to get rid of stuff – but to transcend it, and in so doing transform it into something that serves you, rather than dictating to you. We can do that. 

Our disgust and the so-called reasons for it are fictions WE made up. Anything we invent, we can re-invent.

The more we reinvent ourselves, the easier it gets to let go of the old skins, and renew ourselves, day in, day out.