The Cycle of Brutal Eternium

The human brain contains two evolutionarily distinct processing streams that underlie the difficulty of discussing instinctive behavior without triggering moral panic. Stream A, the ancient limbic circuitry, evolved 1–2 million years ago and governs threat detection, reward, mating, and status behavior. Stream B, the more recent neocortical system, mediates moral reasoning, narrative identity, and symbolic language.

Human sexual and romantic behavior is driven by one ancient, amoral neurological circuit: pleasure-imprint → attachment → threat-detection → approach/attack/defend. The same wiring that once made a man risk his life to protect a woman and her children now makes another man send hundreds of messages, follow a woman, or physically assault her when he perceives loss of access. There is no separate “good protector” brain and “evil abuser” brain; the output flips 180 degrees depending on whether the perceived threat is external or comes from the woman herself. This circuit was adaptive for millions of years but is chronically misfiring in the modern context.

When Stream A fires, Stream B immediately attempts to translate its outputs into moral language because moralization is its primary tool for containment. Society has no vocabulary for the raw operation of the circuit outside terms like “toxic,” “evil,” “patriarchal,” “abusive,” “creepy,” “heroic,” or “romantic.” Moral language historically functioned as the only scalable brake: myths, religions, honor codes, arranged marriage, and shame prevented explosive social misfires. When these frameworks collapsed, they were replaced by modern moral narratives (feminism, toxic masculinity, consent culture, criminal law), yet the circuit does not respond to symbolic authority; it only responds to dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and perceived reproductive threat. Attempts to give unilateral power to punish visible activations reduce overt behaviors but drive the underlying circuitry underground, producing digital stalking, covert obsession, and internalized anxiety. Both sexes become more dysregulated, not less.

Attempts to describe the circuit in technical terms trigger defensive responses because Stream B interprets removal of moral framing as a removal of brakes. Accusations that explaining the mechanism “justifies violence” are thus an evolved immune response: the older circuitry hears “all brakes removed” and panics. In reality, moral framing has no direct leverage on the hardware, while accurate technical framing is the only approach that allows individual men to recognize the activation and insert a microsecond delay before behavior emerges. Shame and punishment only teach the organism to conceal the signal.

At the societal level, only three containment strategies exist:

Hard containment: religion, early marriage, or total control of sexual signaling.
Moral/legal terror: cycles of punishment, shame, and social control.
Individual, post-clarity exit: rare individuals achieve metacognitive observation (Stream C), seeing the circuit without identification, inserting voluntary delays between impulse and action, and withdrawing from the game.

Door 3 is extremely effective for the ~0.0001% who reach it but is unscalable, politically irrelevant, and offers no comfort to those who still rely on collective myth. Consequently, civilization continues cycling between Doors 1 and 2, while the few who walk through Door 3 remain invisible or are dismissed as eccentric.

The structure of the human brain and society can be summarized as follows: perceived input triggers Stream A, which Stream B automatically translates into moral terms. Any demotion of moral framing is experienced as existential threat, producing panic and social accusation. Visible misfires of the circuit are labeled moral failure, prompting new myths, laws, and cycles of moral panic. Quiet, technically informed self-regulation (Door 3) remains invisible. This explains why the loop is highly stable at civilizational scales and why attempts to moralize or punish sexual and romantic behavior rarely eliminate the underlying dynamics. The manual is not a societal proposal; it is a lifeboat schematic for statistical outliers who already sense the circuit cocking and seek a safety switch no sermon, law, or ideology has ever revealed. Everyone else continues to operate under the illusions of symbolic containment while the underlying hardware persists unchanged.

People tend to fear that describing the machinery is the same as endorsing its unbridled expressions. What is actually being described is the same thing that gave rise to the concepts of karmic cycles of reincarnation, the curse of sin upon humanity, or the demiurge who created the world of determined suffering. All of these mythic narratives point to the same truth: we are organisms subject to forces of nature that drive us, and the expression of these forces inevitably brings suffering. We dream of a better world and a perfected self, yet the underlying pressures of the will inevitably leak through and disrupt our plans.

We are subject to desires and motivations that act through us, and because of the social problems they generate, these forces are interpreted and narrated in myth as “problems of good and evil.” The “I” of our conscious, interpretative mind mistakes the symbols it generates in response to the will of nature for the true source of action. Each cosmological model has a narrative that explains why the suffering that results from this condition, both individually and collectively, exists. Some are eternal cyclical models that ultimately restore unity (e.g., karma, Hindu, certain Gnostic systems); others are linear, presenting a single cycle that culminates in one of two possible destinations (Christianity, Islam, Heaven/Hell); and still others are cyclical frameworks structured around disciplined practices, allowing gradual ascent that ultimately leads beyond the cursed dimension altogether (Buddhism, other variations of Gnosticism). A minority are fatalist and brutal, stating that we are in hell, and there is no further move to be made.

None of them are wrong about the bug. They disagree only on the proposed patch notes and the user interface. Some patches are temporary containment (shame, law, early marriage, monasticism). Some point toward individual liberation through disciplined seeing (gnosis, vipassana, contemplation, hesychasm). A few are fatalist and just describe the prison bars. The biological description is simply the first patch written in native machine code instead of high-level metaphor. It doesn’t invalidate the old stories; it reveals they were all looking at the same circuitry through a darker, pre-scientific mirror.

Myth is a symbolic language that reverse-engineers origin narratives from current observations, providing context and explaining the human condition through story. All of them point to the same underlying problem, offering frameworks of understanding based on the tools and awareness available to the culture at the time. This does not imply that all religions are equal; rather, it means they are different responses to the same underlying conditions.

Thus, “I am a sinner too” is a representation of “I share the hard wiring of human animal nature and this interferes with the ideal self my imagination wishes for.” The process of developing consciousness is the liberation of the conscious mind from being a direct, unconscious servant of the will—the fundamental “animal predicament.” As well, "there is a curse upon the human race" alludes to the state of being under the spell of the forces of nature, interfering with our plans for a "better ideal world of the imagination."

To moderate these expressions of nature at a societal scale, only two containment strategies have ever been known to function effectively. The information I present here is intended for those who wish to release themselves individually from the ideologies that trap them in the hostile emotional loop—constantly joining belief tribes and fighting others so that their tribe can enforce one of the two containment strategies. Society re-loops because moralizing is the only scalable containment technology we ever discovered. For 99.99% of the population, Stream B (moral narrative) is the only available override for Stream A.

All known large-scale societies used one of two methods to keep the mating-threat circuit from detonating civilization:
Option 1: Hard mythic containment (religion, honor codes, arranged marriage, total control of female signaling).
Option 2: Moral/legal terror (shame, exile, prison, execution for visible misfires).

Both are crude but scalable.
Option 3 (individual post-clarity exit) is not scalable: it requires metacognitive skill, repeated personal failure, and willingness to live without social validation—traits that cluster in <<0.001% of the population.

Therefore, every time the old containment collapses, society has no choice but to reinvent a new moral narrative and crank the punishment dial again. It is the only tool in the toolbox that works on millions of nervous systems at once.

To be clear, this is not a justification for the behaviors produced by human nature. It is an explanation of the underlying biology that generates them. What is unsettling is the apparent removal of the assumed level of agency we presume we possess, alongside the realization that agency may instead be a negotiated effort against the will of nature—achieved by expanding consciousness to the point where it can intercept and guide the will, much like steering the current of a river. This is not a dogma; it is a framework that integrates multiple components to explain human nature, the suffering it produces, and the collective systems developed to manage it.