This is a useful case study in how etymology (the history of words and language, also called the archeology of ideas) can usefully inform intuitive understandings of complex issues, as well as help us form concepts and investigations based on a biopsychosocial model of neuropsychology, and a holistic integration of biological morality/imperative in modern contexts of applied ethics and social standards.
The use of etymology as an investigative tool is rich with metacognitive insights into human nature as a cogent social and cognitive phenomenon with archaic continuity: an inherently rehumanizing form of metacognitive therapy.
My understanding of this as a weapons technology in operative psychology is based on personal exposure to methods of hypnotic coersion (an advanced technique of learned helplessness in Seigler’s / Pavlov’s conception of behaviorism) ingrained into reflexive response through persistent isolation and reinforcement (primarily negative but with affirmative relief of stress stimulus on condition of complicity). Tactics of stress induction involve starvation / food scarcity and association training, water scarcity and access control, sleep deprivation, communications deprivation, shame/threat-based vocal and movement inhibition, economic rationing and deprivation, and medical denial of access / ingrained mechanisms of autonomy reduction and shame related to medical care.
These conditions are functionally more dehumanizing than incarceration with basic legal oversight and due process guarantees.
This practice constitutes what I would call punitive awareness/reflex, and bypasses conscious participation in a way that punishes being aware and alive in their inate sense (the essence of inalienable if there is one).
This may in fact have legal precedent in a reading of Grants Pass v Johnson et.al, in its ruling on criminalization of biological imperatives, but it also uncovers a mechanism of profound human rights abuse and inherent indignity—an intrinsic contradiction to the rule of law and the legitimacy of authority as such in a democratic system (a system of rule by people, the demographic—whose biology is a structural imperative of governance).
