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Unfortunately, this is very difficult information to communicate. Not because it is intellectually difficult, but because the information is saturated with emotional landmines. It is important directly because it is so effective at 'pushing anyone's buttons'; the truth is locked away behind a universal hypersensitivity to this material. A straight-ahead strategy of treating this material objectively cannot work-- I've tried-- because our subjective emotional experience always gets in the way.
And that, of course, is one of the themes of the book.
DeMeo goes from the micro to the macro, dictated by the breath of this concept. We have to understand that the human being has a very sophisticated reason for our emotions and emotional functions: by taking in continuous information of the outside world and releasing it emotionally, we are able to remain minutely responsive to all inputs and make wise, integrated and creative decisions throughout our lives. This mechanism of emotional release was coined the term 'discharge' by Wilhelm Reich, who studied it extensively in the 1920s and 30s, building on the work of his mentor, Sigmund Freud. It refers to crying, laughing, sighing, shivering, yawning, and other feeling-expressions. The calm, hopeful, potent peace we feel after a long cry is an example of discharge at work.
But as Reich discovered, and as DeMeo exhaustively maps, our society has very thoroughly built mechanisms for suppressing the emotional discharge of its members into the very fabric of our culture, following cultural and historic trends which have existed for at least 5000 years. So the subject is how we all have been acculturated by very common mainstream childraising practices to undermine our own abilities to think clearly and rationally, and to be happy; how -and why- society has imbedded into itself this all-encompassing inhibition of our emotions.
Reich knew that we are all very confused about our emotions; in a society where completely natural emotional expression is essentially taboo, we all are forced to hide our emotional selves inside armor that we have all built to protect ourselves. DeMeo's purpose is to restore a holistic society in which our emotional armoring is not necessary. But its a nearly impossible order; our armor is primed to become defensive at the very mention of our emotionally inhibiting practices.
That said, the strategy DeMeo uses is totally wrong; rather than gently walking us through an exposition of how the emotional baby we've been burying in the closet really holds our most profound truths, he rubs our noses in a long and grisly academic proof that the more sexually violent and misogynistic a society is, the more dysfunctional. He does this by painstakingly charting twenty sexually abusive practices as they've spread culturally in migration routes across the globe over a span of five or six thousand years. No one I've talked to who has read this book has gotten all the way through it; its brutal!
I think the core of this material is emotional, not academic, and requires a personal, not factual approach. By the time DeMeo has completed his brilliant proof, no one is alive to appreciate it, not even his supporters. Which is a shame, because this might be the most important set of ideas at large in the world at this time.
Its a book still waiting to be written.