Political Autoimmune Disorders and Collapse of Civilizations

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Grey’s Arch, Red River Gorge, Kentucky

It’s the day after election day in the U.S., and the results have been discouraging. If you actually believe the Democrats, they are going to sweep in and fix all the flaws in the Trump administration, which they call fascist, by doing all sorts of truly fascist things like putting everyone who they want to finger in jail. Biggest among these is Elon Musk, whose primary sin has been in being too successful in actually starting industries that are paradigm shifting. This is classic Tribal behavior, and I discuss this in detail in the piece prior to this one. It’s not that the Trump administration hasn’t had its share of defects of corruption — it certainly has. The problem with the Ds, though, is the constant undermining of the notion of anyone other than their select coterie of Bolsheviks should have any power. And we all know from history how that ends (spoiler alert for the historically illiterate — millions of people die.)

The problem with all this is that, for some reason/stage of psychosocial development that I haven’t completely figured out, is that all the strategies being advanced by the D’s Praetorian guard, are projected onto the Republicans. As I said above, the Rs at this particular moment in time, are more the standard garden-variety corrupt politicians. That is not what the avant-garde Ds have in mind. So when they accuse the Republicans of being fascist, they’re giving a darker window into their collective id. If the Republicans were really fascists, they would have rounded up all the Democrats and shot them all. And all that talk about the Republicans suspending elections would have already occurred. Of course, nothing of the sort has happened, and more as a display of erratic political will, Trump has already said he wants to work with the Democratic leadership, and by the way, did you know the stock market is up?

Somewhere in the somewhat recent past, a person appropriated the medical term ‘autoimmune disorder’ to describe our politics. What is an autoimmune disease? An autoimmune disease is when your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body. The standard issue versions are rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. In the political/v-Meme context, it’s when an infective agent uses your values to attack and destroy your system of social organization. A great example of that would be the situation I described above. Democrats are using free speech to attack the Republicans, calling them fascist, while essentially gaslighting the public to believe that the Republicans are authoritarians. They are counting on people’s natural moral sense to view the Democratic accusation as somehow justifiable, since we live in an ostensibly rational society. This is intended to cause some revulsion reaction in the general body politic that will relationally disrupt their sense of belonging with the current administration. But it’s without basis. Like I said — if Trump was really a fascist, they’d be dead.

But when you listen to their thought leaders, it’s pretty clear what they want to do to the Republicans. Here’s an interview clip with Kara Swisher, a former tech reporter, who has gone all in on the personality psychopath angle.

A perfect example of an autoimmune political virus at work. Swisher’s words, at least, are scary — but the idea is straightforward — use the principles of justice in liberal republic to go after those she views as enemies. Big Balls was tasked to participate in DOGE, the task force created by Trump, to go after corruption. For his participation in this, Swisher wants him in jail.

It gets worse. Hillary Clinton, otherwise known as an incarnated Demon from the 8th Level of the Inferno, shares air time with Swisher’s fantasy here.

Once again, it is using the systems inside a liberal democratic republic to wage war against the body politic, with the unstated intent of collapse. Positively psychopathic.

We are currently seeing a new wave of Muslim politicians who are also playing the same autoimmune card. The Islamic faith in any fundamental interpretation is profoundly at odds with the notion of a liberal democracy, that is built on a foundation of individual rights, and processes that clearly divide church and state. Additionally, there are a whole panoply of mullah-sanctioned offenses that would lead to literal execution if we followed Islamic law — such as stoning of homosexuals and adulterers. Forget the whole deal around pigs — dogs are a much larger level for social control in a Western society. According to some interpretations, dogs are unclean, and in order for some Muslims to feel “safe” in society, dogs must be removed from public spaces in order to “respect their religion.” The recent media stream has seen quite a bit going on about the sacrilegious effects of dog saliva.

The accommodation that will be sought, though, will be more strict leash laws, with punishment. Why does this matter? Dog parks are one of the few places I’ve been to in the last ten years where I could actually talk to random people and build friendships. I don’t have young children any more, and if you’re not clubbing or on the PTA, you’re sorely limited in meeting people. Regular parks already have been wrecked for social connection due to homelessness, as well as general paranoia. Imagine me, a 64 year old man, approaching a young woman with a child. ‘Nuf said..

But dogs change that. Dogs don’t care who’s butt they sniff as long as they are friendly butts. This inevitably leads to conversations.

One of the main cohorts that finds this reprehensible is the Islamic contingent. They breed into their children a fear of dogs, even though kids naturally want to pat dogs. Kids are also bombarded with images in the media of dogs being cute things that like kids and want to be petted. So those Muslim parents have some uphill work to do.

And the situation is also exacerbated by other autoimmune societal influencers. There is a powerful movement in the dog world that you shouldn’t own a dog that is not a rescue from a shelter. But in more toxic communities, like where I used to live (Moscow ID/Pullman WA) some percentage of the rescues were pit bull and pit bull crosses trucked up from southern CA shelters specializing in rescuing dogs from houses subject to drug busts. A large percentage of these dogs are actually un-remediable, and will bite. Not exactly the kind of dog you want off leash. The percentage of pit bulls in the pet population will directly influence people’s rational fears about getting bitten. Where I live now, there are only a few, and most of these are on the leash. But regardless, because we’re at that point of societal devolution, no one would think of dog agency as something to be managed. And what THAT means is the owners of dogs with high bite potential would never muzzle their dogs — an easy solution. Muzzling your dog would be a huge status decrement, and would detract from the fact that you are superior to the people went out and bought a particular breed for specific characteristics. It would also send a parallel signal that you mapped to one’s hatred for any kind of cultural or dog breed relativism. You are no better than me with your well-trained purebred borzoi that will come from a mile away to your whistle. It is a weird form of White Guilt, eloquently described by Eli and Shelby Steele, in their latest eponymously named documentary. Pit bull lives matter!

The result is an amazing example of how a political autoimmune disease affects a particular niche of society, with repercussions. Loosely enforced leash laws, which really are ‘leash heuristics’ turn into societal connection destroyers. No one who doesn’t know a person already is going to walk up to another person with a dog on a leash and walk alongside them. Relational mixing is broken down, in the name of “respecting their religion.” Worse, on my way out the door from my last gig, I believe I had a preliminary Title IX complaint filed against me because I took my dogs to class for a “petting day”. As weird as this may sound, this was also a way of enforcing status-based authoritarianism already rife in the university environment. When the former president’s wife (called the First Lady!) was active, she had a pair of corgis who honestly spread joy to lots of students. I was considered acting beyond my station by doing the same. In case you missed it, Americans love dogs, and the kids in my class would eagerly grab onto my border collies for selfies and pats.

But there goes that autoimmune disease thing again — using a set of values (respect for someone’s religion) as a vehicle to shut down social connection and be part of a larger societal devolution. And yes — Islam is rife with that. Kathy Hochul wearing a hijab. It’s not hard to find examples.

The problem is once they’re in charge, that sense of plurality goes out the window, pronto.

The wild thing is that you don’t have to look far afield to find actual Muslim countries that constrain the Muslim faith. Most of the central Asian ‘stans’ restrict the Azan — the Muslim call to prayer. There are other restrictions as well. It’s not hard to figure out which ones — look at native dress for women. Short version — if they are allowed to show their hair, the governments have realized some form of separation and control of religion. They may not be as “evolved” as our own government, with its bans on religious restrictions. But they also recognize fundamentalist Islam is problem. The mullahs issue fatwas for the religion, and functionally form the governments where they’re allowed to.

This also makes Islam particularly problematic, because there is no really evolutionary possibility for Islam in the context of psychosocial evolution. You can’t get to any real personal agency because you have the mullahs waving the Quran. And so, not surprisingly, we can see entire belts of nations, particularly in the Arab world, that are stuck. And thanks to our own government, that took out the secular aspirational leadership in places like Libya (not like these places didn’t have problems, folks) we now have, in the 21st Century, slave markets. All endorsed by Islam. Sometimes, the autoimmune disease destroys the host.

The problems also occur when you have competitive autoimmune diseases who both are working on overwhelming the current systems of restraint. Once again — by using the liberal societies’ moral codes against it. These opposing forces are fine with co-opting these value sets, and even supporting others at the same psychosocial developmental level until they get control. Then, once control is achieved, they will turn on each other. All of these are relationally devolutional/psychopathic control strategies, so as long as there are lines in the sandbox that separate them enough, they will play well together. Until they’ve destroyed the higher v-Meme host. And then you better believe all Hell is going to break loose. Nothing is more emblematic of this than the whole ‘Free Palestine’ movement being supported by the whole LGBTQ+ Poison Frog movement. The Muslim contingent of the Free Palestine movement, being fundamentalist, would have no patience for purple-haired and nose-pierced lesbians, who have adopted totemic superficial symbols that allow easy identification.

It’s easy to pick on Islam, but you don’t have to go far psychosocially to realize that this is an aggregate development/cultural issue. The grooming gang scandal in the UK is mostly a Pakistani concoction, and a classic example of how an autoimmune disorder is unraveling a society in the wildest way possible. Legitimizing a lack of criticism because of racism of organized gangs literally raping tens of thousands of underage girls is how you destroy a society.

Likewise, making it a hate crime if a person refuses to use a trans-person’s pronouns. That’s another autoimmune disease. Why? When you extract all agency out of a society for a person to correctly relationally define themselves adjacent to someone else, you’re essentially banning a person from being rational. Surrendering that ability is what makes a liberal democracy possible. And so the devolutionary trend begins. The MAIN structure of an advanced, high trust society goes in the toilet.

The same thing has happened in the context of the various DEI campaigns. What happens is not that the body politic doesn’t recognize that it has an autoimmune disorder. It’s that there are warping reactions that occur in society, as society uses social status and money to move to more normal and normative means of relating. I’ll never forget a couple of summers ago touring the wine country in the Willamette Valley. We stopped at a particularly swanky winery — Chateau Serene — for a tasting. They had a complex gating system to get in, and even after that, a glass of wine cost $32. You better believe there wasn’t a minority in the place.

There’s a continuing list of psychosocial autoimmune diseases – things like chronic protests against the viability of the USA as being a reasonable country. Using free speech to hijack societal devolution is a standard. I’d encourage you to make your own list. Key elements are, of course, constantly tearing down present society with no constructive solutions, along with the consequential outcome of chaos and anarchy — all collapse vectors. Drugs and facilitation given to addicts, instead of enforced treatment — that would be a big one. Turning over libraries to homeless people in the name of “compassion”. Centering the freedom of the mentally ill — that would be a prime collapse narrative and a great example of a psychosocial autoimmune disease. Decreasing the window of tolerance for things that provide some kind of normative joy. Even incidental versions that are inconsequential — banning peanuts on airplane flights. The refusal to clean up government programs from corruption, as has happened in places like Minneapolis, MN, because of potential discrimination of the Somali community. What an autoimmune disease that is!

The first step towards fixing any of this is to recognize it. Here’s the blueprint. Now I gotta go play with my dogs in a public space. Boo Boo’s got some squirrels to hunt. Off leash.

Understanding Modern Relevance in the Tribal v-Meme

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
A scenic view of a narrow canyon with steep reddish rock formations, reflecting in a calm river under a clear blue sky.

Marble Canyon, Grand Canyon, Colorado River – you wanna see baseline tribal behavior? Go on a 20 day river trip

(For more stuff on v-Memes, go here.)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Tribal v-Meme in the last couple of years. Why? Because the Tribal v-Meme is the baseline for social human behavior, and has been Darwinially selected against for literally 100s of thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that all the behavior inside the v-Meme is what we would consider, in the modern age, as prosocial, moral, or good. It does mean that the mix of good and evil that we observe came from somewhere automatically, and sits right on the edge in our brain of both hardware and software. And the stuff that gets waved around by anthropologists and sociologists as “left behind” (often used to sell some behavioral regression by that bunch) isn’t all good. Lots of it IS bad, and cannot get discussed.

The reason it can’t be discussed is because the negative stuff is embedded deep in taboo structures even in contemporary society. Talking about things like rape and child abuse — core elements of tribal cultures — get people excited. But as I’ve written about psychopathy, persistent in humans since the dawn of time, these other unpleasantries are also features — not bugs — and it would help to understand them, since the Left has not only decided some superficial level of their views must be considered in modern decision making — they’re also embodying these structures inside their own social organizations.

We also don’t spend much time realizing that behaviors active in the Tribal v-Meme that contemporary society might endorse is also likely tied to behaviors that same society would not endorse at all. As one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie, said,

“You want the good stuff of being Indian without all the bad stuff, enit?”

—Chess Warm Water, speaking to Betty and Veronica in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, Chapter 6.

(Do note that Alexie has now effectively been canceled, ostensibly for sexual harassment reasons. I can’t comment on this, having not seen the evidence. But Alexie’s message is highly subversive along the same lines – we just don’t get the whole balance of Tribal living, which stabilized humanity enough to start the upward climb to the societies we have today. It’s strangely coincident that he got canceled at the beginning of all this Woke nonsense.)

Take a subject like female rape. There’s no question at all that Tribal v-Meme societies traded women with other tribes when they would collect around shared hunting grounds like the Buffalo Commons. Women could not consensually agree to such behavior. And as a background, rape and group sex were common in Tribal v-Meme societies. The recent Apple TV series, ‘Chief of War’ doesn’t sugarcoat any of this (h/t to Jason Momoa in his striving for authenticity.)

But that also implies that such behavior is deeply embedded in our shared human psyche — especially to be considered in the context of the recent Cornell 7 incident. The notion that the young woman, ‘Jane Doe’, didn’t willingly participate is belied by her follow-up text messages. The only thing that really broke her and changed her tune was being disinvited from the fraternity tribe, aka party, two weeks later. From a Tribal v-Meme memetic perspective, that makes total sense. Whatever circuits fired deep in her brain to have a gang bang with seven frat boys were far more in keeping with her desire for survival than being abandoned, which from a primeval perspective would result in her death. Of course, these emergent thoughts are buried deep. But those are also long-evolutionary-time natural selection-rewarded behaviors.

And even something as violent and socially repugnant as rape itself (with no ambiguity) was likely validated as a Tribal v-Meme survival strategy. Spreading your genes inside another tribe lines up from a sociobiological perspective. But there are other insights. If you look at human populations, they didn’t really jump up until the last 1000 years or so. Why? Because capital violence was also rife in tribal cultures. It could be that the number of active uteruses your tribe possessed had to be in play at all times in order to keep your tribe from going extinct. Hence, rape, while in a modern sense, repugnant, was a valid strategy for producing enough babies to balance off intra-tribal violence. Not exactly an anthropologist’s selling point for making us believe in the politically correct aspirational nature of tribal cultures.

The impetus for this piece today was watching a video where Canadian indigenous people were demanding billionaires’ wealth for one day. Here is the piece.

All this “sounds” so reasonable and contemporary. But it’s also a hallmark of the Tribal v-Meme. Tribes didn’t develop technology with the intent of lifting up any of the surrounding nations to their own. The way you got things you couldn’t make yourself was to steal it from the person that had it. And lest you think somehow that this was just a feature of American Indians, you’d be wrong. The thing that drove the original Mongol invasions of China was desire for fine silks. That started the chain of events for entire Mongol Empire — the greatest in expanse the world has ever known.

But as far as inventing MORE wealth? It simply does not occur in the v-Meme. Far worse than a zero-sum game interpretation — wealth must be taken from others. It’s in the memetics.

Why so much of this matters is it has the potential to tell you the level of mental sophistication of the party across the table that you might happen to be dealing with. If you hear self-aggrandized dogma about the Hazda tribal people in Africa, you are likely dealing with a Tribal Resonator across the table from you. And these things go all the way up. Robert Reich, former Clinton Labor Secretary, has been on the media streams lately demanding nationalization and seizure of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink properties. He’s preaching to a core Democratic base, which has also doubled down on violence to external individuals (witness the praised reaction to the shootings of Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk!) but also to their own that go against core memetic principles inside the party — like the whole trans issue. The Ds just can’t quit this stuff because sexual violation and mutilation is core to creating more psychopathic warriors, which is sadly and crazily enough ALSO a core maintenance behavior of the Tribal v-Meme.

And they’ve made things perfectly clear about what’s going to happen to anyone joining their most hated out-group — the Republican party — if they win the election. Senator (D-Michigan) Elissa Slotkin has spoken publicly (along with Demon-in-chief Hillary Clinton) about the need to make sure any young conservatives realize they will be jailed if they support the Trump administration.

The problem with such deep embedding in the Tribal v-Meme is that the way tribes settle differences rarely involves complex negotiations. It involves unrestrained violence between psychopathic cadres on both sides. That means things like civil war. And there are no wars in history that don’t provide death and destruction like them. The highest American death toll from war was from the American Civil War, where somewhere between 620K-700K Americans lost their lives.

When people tell you who they are memetically, it behooves one to listen. Why? Because memetics, and their v-Memes, are emergent and generative. It’s the unstated future policies we should be concerned with — and those will be in line with the Tribal v-Meme. I’ve never seen an election cycle where there were almost NO real issues being discussed actively, though of course there is some declarative nonsense on the usual campaign literature. I’m getting to the point where I’d welcome a little discussion time spent on mundane issues, such as more or less taxes on the larger body politic, would be welcomed. Because what IS being daylighted on the Democratic side is Tribal politics by any measure. As I wrote in this piece, the Psychopaths are in charge.

As I’ve said many times on this blog, complex modern societies are maintained by complex information, in both quantity and structure. And the current threatened Tribal warfare offers little hope of maintaining the population number and standard of living in contemporary society for anyone. We live in a top-level society based on the Performance v-Meme — which is a good thing. Performance-based societies increase the standard of living for some more than others — this is true. But they also produce more stuff in general. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats.

But any psychosocial devolution due to Tribal memetic forces will not create more of anything. And that is the pathway to violence. Because when there ain’t enough to go around, you gotta get rid of extra people somehow.

Psychopathic Double Binds and Anthropogenic Global Warming

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ball is Life

One of the most extreme examples of psychopathic capture of an issue has involved a subject near and dear to my heart — Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). The planet is very likely in a warming phase — we are coming out of an Ice Age, after all — but whether or not it’s actually being caused by humans or not is another question entirely. The mechanism proposed is CO2 production through burning of fossil fuels. But that is not complete enough to know whether it even has an effect on planetary climate. The short evidence — we still have not exceeded last century’s temperature maxima (those happened in the 1930s) and the lack of hurricanes — indicate even if we are responsible, there’s just not that much effect.

If you need some more sophisticated statistical analysis, I highly recommend Roger Pielke’s Substack, The Honest Broker. This post is a reasonable place to start with the various doomsday scenarios, because it confronts the dismantling of what’s known as RCP8.5, one of the more extreme portraits.

What’s more interesting in the context of this blog is why the climate community just can’t quit this nonsense. The answer is the climate community really isn’t about climate. What the climate community is about is psychopathy and relational collapse, which is the point. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, the best bet, if you really believe that the climate is being destroyed by manmade means, is to double down on local and regional protection. As my pals, theoretical physicists Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, champions of the Biotic Pump theory, and affiliated with the Petersburg Institute in Russia say, every remaining scrap of native ecosystem likely has value towards contributing to planetary climate homeostasis. Trying to apply scattershot efforts on stopping the burning of fossil fuels is nuts.

But there’s good money in it ~ $15B/year is spent on the issue. And never a peep about the one thing we could do — actually save our remaining undisturbed planet.

I’m not going to tell people that the money doesn’t matter. But the problem with the true believers is more interesting. For a lot of them, it is true. It IS their livelihood. And stepping back from AGW in a world already saturated with meaning-seekers who have found a way to make a living off this would be challenging. The homelessness business (and it is a business) likely totals in around $40B. Not big enough to absorb all those Climate Warriors. But Homelessness Inc. is mostly just parasitic graft. Climate is bigger, because it offers a profound lever for generating societal collapse. And that’s gonna get the psychopathic pros off the sidelines and into a variety of games.

Like the midterm elections. There’s not a single Democratic candidate that will stand up and say they think climate change is bullshit – even partially. Much like the trans issue, which seeks to generate that cohort of revolutionary psychopathic change agents, AGW seeks to pull the levers that will destroy health (so much of the AGW movement is veganism and anti-meat in disguise) destroy immediate freedom (no transportation systems) and drive energy usage ever downward. If there is an indicator of prosperity, it is energy usage/citizen. If anything in the current movement was pro-prosperity, you’d see massive support for construction of nuclear power plants. But the long-term collapse people have been sabotaging nuclear energy for a while. And even in the face of potential fossil fuel shortages, there’s nary a peep. Because replacement of energy is simply not part of the strategy. That would PREVENT collapse. And that’s not in the psychopathic cards.

One of the most insidious parts of the AGW attackers is their insistence on destroying meat consumption. Like it or not, eating meat is directly related to all sorts of positive health outcomes. Our current obesity crisis is directly related to excessive carbohydrate consumption, and as I’ve written early (back in the 20-teens) it likely is also driving brain worms. What’s wild about the chronic attacks on meat consumption is that it is a historic way of debilitating an entire population through bad diet. People on potatoes can’t fight back. And one of my favorite stories about the ONLY tribe in Mexico that managed to beat back the conquistadores — the Yaqui — have a foundational myth that when the Spaniards showed up, the deer came to them in a dream and told them it was time to eat meat.

One of my favorite X feed writes is a guy named Sama Hoole. He regularly lays out timelines like the one below. From @SamaHoole

The year is 1087. The king’s forester rides up to the door. The deer in the wood are the king’s now, and a man caught with venison in his pot is blinded for it. Your father ate deer. You will eat oats.

The year is 1217. The king’s men come every third year with a block, a chisel and a mallet. Your dog’s forefoot goes on the block and three claws come off at one blow, so he can never again run down a stag. The fine for a dog with his feet intact is three shillings, a month of your labour. The law never says you may not eat meat. It only takes the dog’s toes.

The year is 1400. The priest comes every spring. For 40 days there is no meat, no butter, no milk, no eggs, and with the year’s other fasts the Church takes about 150 days of flesh off your table. It is for your soul. The bishop keeps his capons.

The year is 1649. You put your cow on the common, because the grass grows for nobody. The gentlemen ride up the hill with clubs and beat her until she is not expected to live. A poor man with a cow does not need a landlord. That was the offence.

The year is 1666. Parliament declares Irish cattle a common nuisance and bars them from England. The herds that fed an island for 2,000 years go for salt beef, and the island goes onto the potato. In 1847 the ships still leave Cork with butter and bacon under armed guard, past the people dying on the quay.

The year is 1915. The professors come with a calculation. The pig eats food fit for people, so the pig must go. Millions are slaughtered in a season. Then there is no pork, no lard, no manure for the fields, and around 750,000 civilians starve in the winter remembered by the turnip.

The year is 1940. The man at the door has a ration book. Meat is bought by the shilling, and it stays rationed until 1954, nine years after the war ends. It is for the nation. The restaurants of Mayfair were never on the book.

The year is 1961. A professor is on the cover of Time. The doctor tells you the fat on your meat is clogging your arteries, and the butter must go for the oil. The study has 6 countries in it. 22 were available.

The year is 1977. A Senate committee issues the country with a diet, the first government on earth to do it. Less meat and fat, more grain. The obesity line, flat for 50 years, turns upward within the decade.

The year is 1992. A pyramid arrives in every classroom, 6 to 11 servings of bread at the base and the meat squeezed up near the point. The woman who drew the first draft had put the grain at 2 to 4. The Secretary’s office changed it.

The year is 2015. The World Health Organization puts your bacon in the same cancer category as tobacco. The spinach carries 100 times the nitrate and no label.

The year is 2019. A commission funded by a billionaire publishes a diet for the planet. Red meat: 14 grams a day. Half a rasher. The members fly in to announce it.

The year is 2026. The man at the door carries no chisel, no ration book, no map. He carries a carbon target. The cattle on the hill are to be culled for the climate, the farm taxed on death until it sells, and you are asked to give up meat for the good of everyone, by people who have never gone a week without it.

The deer were the king’s. The cow was the lord’s. The fast was God’s. The fat was the heart’s. The planet is the latest owner of your dinner.

A thousand years, and the reason has changed every century. The plate never has.

Nobody has ever banned meat for the common man. They just come to the door every generation with a very good reason, and take three claws at a time.

Now it’s time for you to pay attention. We are seeing a flood of foreign money into our elections. The key thing to remember that it is assistive, and momentum generating. The heiresses – Jobs and Bezos are staking their positions as well. The thing about electing officials who have stated that they will decide on climate, and will work to change our system of governance, is they are seeking to lock in control. I personally do not believe they can do it, at least not in this election cycle. But if you think they’re going to quit, well, I’ve got some news for you.

Why? The beauty of campaigning around AGW is that its actual planetary effects are unmeasurable. Yet the vectors by which they will attack this basically nonexistent problem are clear and definable. You knock out meat because of methane, and by removing energy from your society, you absolutely start the downward cycle of relational degeneration. And it is Mandate from Heaven stuff — “if we don’t do this, the planet will die!”

There were folks that had similar strategies before us – namely the Aztecs. “If we don’t cut out people’s hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun, the Sun won’t rise!”

And we all know what happened to them. You still end up with collapse — in the most prosperous time the planet has ever known. If it seems psychopathic, it’s because it is. So get out there and vote.

Understanding Psychopathic Attacks – DARVO and More

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Thunderheads over Kansas, from 35,000′

One of the more recent acronyms used in describing the tactics of the Left is called DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. But it is not a new tactic, nor attributable in any particular way to a socialist perspective. What it is is a psychopathic projection mechanism where the psychopath will accuse someone of a crime they either previously had committed, or was planning to commit. People with narcissistic personality disorder are famous for this — accusing someone they have targeted as being a narcissist. And if you listen carefully, you can often learn what strategy your attacker is planning to use on you by not reacting under the duress of accusation. The ‘not reacting’ is key — and the correct way to do this is to NOT fill in the holes in their accusations. People that have little experience dealing with people with personality disorders will often go long on attempting to rationally construct a backstory for WHY that person gave the accusation in the first place. As I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, JUST DON’T DO THIS. Far better to ask them to “tell me more” — which will reveal far more of what’s going on in the mind of the psychopath you’re dealing with. Or alternately, just leaving it alone. When dealing with disordered thinking, it’s also important to pop out of the frame and realize that you cannot understand their thinking in the first place.

But certainly, don’t feed fuel to the fire.

A more common attack, of which DARVO is more likely a subset, is to understand how psychopaths play the victim card to exploit a situation. Below is a screenshot from a video taken during the BLM protests in LA.

The looters during the riot were brandishing a traffic safety pole, attempting to break the windows of the bakery. When the employee appeared with a shotgun, the young man moved to the front of his fellow rioters and dropped to his knees, attempting to provoke some attack that would justify further violence. The employee did not shoot him.

This is a common psychopathic ploy in current protests, as part of some absurd victim Olympics competition. The goal embedded in the action is to either incite a Tribal v-Meme reaction — if he had been shot, the angry rioters would have stormed the store and caused greater harm — or a Legalistic v-Meme reaction — the police would then have arrested the shooter and charged him criminally. The latter action has been greatly facilitated by the ubiquity of cell phone recording devices — I pulled this example off X.

This strategy is actually a core technique in civil disobedience — designed to use the conscience of the audience against them so they change their mind. The core difference in a psychopathic manipulation is the time scale. The actions are at the core impulsive. That young man did not plan to drop to his knees as part of the protest — but did so because of some euphoric decision made in the moment.

Once a technique like this becomes embedded inside a community, it becomes a core strategy. In my old community of Moscow ID/Pullman ID, I was functionally cast out when I wrote an op-ed against Tony Fauci, and another telling the local community that masks did not work to prevent the spread of COVID. I was attacked by a woman in a motorized wheelchair (I kid you not) screaming at me for telling her that masks didn’t work. It is difficult, in this circumstance, to divine whether this person (she was an art professor) to know if this was true psychopathic behavior, feminized social control, or impulsive rage. Nevertheless, it was a provocation intended to get some response out of me — which I avoided. She certainly knew that I wasn’t going to hit a woman in a wheelchair. But had I done so, as the large man in the altercation, the police would have carted me away and I would have been charged with aggravated assault.

The second real attack against me was also likely impulsive, but far more psychopathic. A man I had previously worked with on Democratic elections was at the dog park I used to frequent. I was surrounded by witnesses (my awesome dog park ladies) and we were playing with all our dogs. My little girl Cecilia had run off to the other side of the dog park, to play with his dog. Upon realizing that Cecilia belonged to me, he scooped a bag of dog feces, and approached our group, literally screaming at the top of his lungs. He then hurled the sack of dog excrement at my person, and attempted to steal my dog, all the time screaming his moral position that I was an irresponsible dog owner and did not deserve a dog. Once again, he was attempting to get me to assault him, as I was obviously the much larger party, which would have led to my arrest. During the altercation, I was attempting to place him among people that I knew, and was aided by one of my companions, who were also busy screaming at him. I did file a police report, but settled for a visit of the individual’s house by the police department.

The pattern, though, is clear. An individual who identifies with some ‘We’ group, attacks from an INFERIOR position, believing that either the tribal group or legalistic institution will rally to their side, and destroy the target of their moralizing. Both men and women execute this behavior, though you can see how it is a more effective strategy if the aggressor is a small woman and the target is a large man. When the cops show up, the bigger party will always be the one loaded in the police cruiser.

This would be only so worrisome if this attack writ large was not planned by the Left on a national scale. Here, the plot is classic Color Revolution nonsense. It the latest draft, just out today, the stated goal of the Left by a variety of groups is to create civil chaos so that Trump cracks down on public groups, which then give Democratic governors the authority to overthrow the current executive.

From my X mutual, @DataRepublican (Jennica Pounds)

🚨🚨THE DEMOCRACY FILES, PART 2: WHEN AND HOW TO DECLARE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ILLEGITIMATE 🚨

Some questioned whether a group of 200 ex-USAID officials could actually pull off their ambitions to rewrite the Constitution.

Here, they describe exactly how it works. They aren’t working alone.

The videos all come from Renew to Thrive (R2T) group and associates. Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz play key roles within R2T.

R2T sits inside a much, much larger umbrella called United Democracy Alliance (UDA), which is an extremely hush-hush control plane of leaders from major “blocking” NGOs such as 50501 and Indivisible fulfilling various functions. UDA decides when protests get deployed, timelines, how to respond, all that.

R2T’s role within UDA is concerned with “the day after tomorrow” – in other words, their function is to conceive what a rewritten American government will look like after the rest of UDA fulfills its purpose. As will be shown, Erica Chenoworth is credited with conceiving UDA in the first place under the Horizons “Big Tent” initiative.

Note here that National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A) is credited for operationalizing UDA. NSL4A is a group of 1,600 ex-military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials. They are led by Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith (Ret). NSL4A also played a key role in the “illegal orders” messaging which targeted Pete Hegseth. Zeitz is also a member of NSL4A.

It must be emphasized that the choice of a military-oriented organization to coordinate NGOs across domestic protests is an interesting one all in itself – especially in an umbrella conceived by a regime change expert like Chenoworth.

You will have a hard time finding any mentions of UDA in the public. They are extremely hush-hush and selective who they talk to.

Mike Smith himself makes a personal appearance in other calls, coordinating Insurrection Act exercises and roleplaying with R2G as one of the participants.

As the audio transcript shows, they have outlined a sequence of “redlines” in which case the federal government should be declared illegitimate. Invoking the Insurrection Act against “peaceful” protesters is one of the most discussed redlines. I will post the illegitimate criteria below, but basically, almost any effective pushback against NGOs is a measure of illegitimacy according to them.

Important to understand:
The audio shows they shopped this idea around governors, but the reality is that governors do not have to explicitly sign on to the pact to play their role in the coup. All they have to do is refuse troops in their state and let UDA / R2G do the work of dissolving the federal government.

@DataRepublican has a new book out that charts these types of relationships — Unelected.

There is much more to write — but one key takeaway is that various psychopathic strategies scale, with the same patterns. And psychopaths are not quite as clever as you might think — but they are persistent. Using the inferior strength position to attack a larger target, then gather sympathy, and then laddering that, within or without context, for the sentiments of a larger crowd is a classic psychopathic strategy.

Why Lesbians, Indians and Beta Males Run Today’s Universities

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Who needs a throw rug when you have a borzoi?

Note: This article is chock-a-block full of triggering models and language, and cultural relativity that many people in power will find extremely offensive. And not because it’s wrong.

I’m fresh off reading the recent university self-study for Cornell University, titled the Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University. I don’t know if I should encourage you to download it and read it for yourself — but the link is above. It’s like sitting in a 238 page faculty meeting with earnest, but clueless group of diverse/not-diverse not-so-cool kids trying to figure out how they can justify not doing their jobs and doing what they want while being incessantly bullied by a group of professional mountebanks who are using the institution to rob the public blind while policing their language. In fact, policing the language is a big part of what universities have elected themselves to do. It’s part of the destructive strategy that essentially alien agents have pursued to collapse the host that feeds it.

The report was commissioned by the Cornell Provost, an Indian woman named Kavita Bala, who happens to come from both a computer science background, and Mumbai where she received a B.S. degree. She has a Wikipedia page. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, which gives her something like 25 years in the Sausage Factory (my colloquial name for the academy.) What is notable is that a.) she is the head of one of the most prominent (if not THE most prominent) public/private universities in the world. Cornell has a blended background that way, and you can investigate if that intrigues you. Bala is negatively impressive in a metacognitive way — she’s no thought leader in anything, having never issued an opinion that I could find, and she’s in a fascinating, collapsing discipline — especially in higher education, and one of the absolute first educational disciplines to be subsumed by AI. She is the force who ostensibly is going to lead us out of the wilderness. Good luck with that.

The report, like so many faculty meetings, exists to reassure the disordered people running the show in higher ed, that they really are nice folks, and all they really need to do is tune up their niceness to each other a little, while riding herd over the lower castes of autists and disciplinary slaves. The fact that they are sucking up inordinate amounts of public cash interests them only in that this public largesse appears to be coming to an end, and they are mostly likely unemployable in anything other than producing their bullshit, which the public, or rather parents of the next generation and the entire business enterprise of the country aren’t buying. What is stunning is there is no awareness, self- or otherwise, how they got into this pickle. Their mommies and daddies all were profoundly congratulatory at the various gates that were necessary for someone like Bala to pass through to draw her inordinate salary, likely north of $700K/year. Why are the lower castes not bowing down?

The report’s solutions to the academic crisis are milquetoast — more experiential education, more neglected publics, don’t short the all-important research, preserve the liberal arts, and so on. A renewed emphasis on Academic Civility — as if the reason that there are no dissenting opinions at Cornell was because people just aren’t being nice enough. There’s no mention of the obvious capture of the university by the DEI apparatus, as well as NO disclosure of the endless haranguing every employee at a university must be subjected to as part of their job conditions. No mention of the devastating effects COVID lockdowns had that drove some of these changes. No mention of the effects of DEI on student admissions, nor their expectations, and the university’s desire to service those, instead of stand for something other than the endless immiseration of its adherents.

So let’s cut to the chase and resolve how we got here. It’s a collapse story, just FYI. But its origins are actually mathematical in nature. I know that won’t satisfy folks looking for the red meat of racism, or anti-racism. But it’s the closest thing to a complicated truth. The problem is to get out of the hole requires some serious modifications of the transmogrified OS that runs places like Cornell, and those aren’t likely to happen, at least from an internal, conscious perspective.

Back in the early ’90s there was kind of an awakening across academia that academia as a whole was too white. I was part of that, and participated. It WAS true that most folks across the top of the institution were white men. What was interesting, though, was that even back in the ’80s, things were different. There was increasing “administrative professionalism” that was settling in across the nation.

What does that mean? We used to have administrators, but we also had faculty at the top in key positions. Yes, there would be a formal business manager for business administration. But top VP positions were also held by older professors. The way it would work was that IF you had a successful career, and you were personable and outgoing, you, one day, would get a call from the president. He (they were almost all ‘he’s’) would say “Chuck, we need an outgoing dealmaker who understands how to collegially adjudicate some of the various issues, as well as likes students enough to make the rounds to the dorms. We need a VP for Student Affairs. The gig will run 3 years, and after that, you can return to the faculty, and we’ll make sure you have time to write your book until you retire. Are you interested?”

You had been called to service, and would assent. And then coast off into retirement with time to finally put that long, career summative manuscript together. Deal.

But by my estimate, by the early ’90s, this kind of deal was dead. In place was a rapidly expanding administrative cohort. In my own university, I’ll never forget the beginning of an early presidential search. One of the candidates looked out across the sea of VPs, Vice-Provosts and the like and said “there sure seems to be a lot of you.”

At the same time, the nascent DEI apparatus was starting to be formed. You had true believers like myself (I did this!) going out in communities with diverse constituencies (in Washington, our primary minority was, and is Latin American) and recruiting students. And at the same time, there was a push to make both the professoriate and the administration look a little less white.

And there WAS racism. But the way the racism was baked in was that even back then, to get hired as a faculty member, you needed to come from a very constrained, elite group of universities. And like it or not, THOSE places mostly had white students. I graduated from Duke with my Ph.D. in 1987. My advisor was the Dean, and he had formerly been a full professor at Princeton. Folks in the academy actually thought a Duke Ph.D. degree was an inferior degree.

The key thing to remember here is that no one group of anything is monolithic. There might be some probabilistic variation, but for the sake of this piece, it’s fair to assume that people are distributed in some kind of normal, bell-shaped curve with talents and intelligence. What racism did (or even the inherent racism of institutions) was distort that bell curve. Where it did it the worst was on the right side of the distribution. People who were talented were suppressed.

And so you could march down the phenotypes. Black, East Asian, South Asian, Mexican, whatever. But most importantly, WOMEN. White women. When that dam, that vertical wall on the right side of the distribution came down, the best got picked first. African-Americans were the most highly prized in the treasure hunt, mostly because there were so damn few of them. The best got vacuumed up at places like Harvard, and displayed prominently across the literature produced by those organizations. Women were kinda down there on the list, as well as Hispanics. Native Americans were non-existent — a college degree has always been a tough sell on the Res. Those people want to go back to their place. Asians were obviously far easier.

But it didn’t matter. The quantities favored white women. And so across academia, women started getting hoovered up into both faculty and administrative positions. Obviously, disciplines like engineering were still poorly represented — there were (and still are) almost no women to hire.

And while I’ll admit it is a generalization — who is more likely to get ahead in their career? We were still bean-counting resumes on hiring committees. Who had more beans to count? Women with kids, or women without kids? If you can’t guess that, you’re probably not going to grok this essay anyway.

And then, who is more likely to not have kids? The answer is part of the subject of this essay. Lesbians. Lots of them. I noticed this by the late ’90s. Our provost was a lesbian, though it was not talked about as freely as today. There was no gay marriage either, so there was major consternation on how her partner was going to be compensated. This was 30 years ago. Think hushed tones.

And the tide continued. Like attracts like. More and more. And as all the lesser universities attempted to move into the research game (this happened around the turn of the century — 2000) there was increased demand for students, which could not be acquired locally. But people living in Third World countries were happy to oblige. They sent us their sons, and to a lesser extent, their daughters.

With more demand from lower prestige schools, there also was more demand for technical Ph.Ds to fill those slots. And with looser financing, even white kids who wanted a delayed adolescence would be encouraged to fill up those humanities slots. They were paying their way. And whom were we to discriminate against the cultural predilections of entire minority communities? One undiscussable point is how so many of these communities a.) thrive on status, as opposed to performance, and b.) eat their young. The African-American community is terrible about this. Getting to be called “Dr.” is a big deal. I think it comes out of the faith tradition — but it’s also because the majority African-American community is very authoritarian. Lots of the Ph.Ds in the softer arts were auto-ethnographic. So if you were willing to pay the university $200K, which the government would finance, you could write a report on how you spent your summer vacation and how oppressed you were, and they would give you a Ph.D.

At the time, I was the Chair of the University Faculty Senate — kind of the political head of the entire faculty. I was given the job of university restructuring by the current president, an old Mormon leader who ended up being my biggest fan – a story for another time. I went around to all the minority faculty and talked to them. “We only have money for one thing — 20 recruiters, or 1 VP? Which do you prefer?” They unanimously said “we want the VP.” I admonished them. “A VP is not boots-on-the-ground,” what I now understand as a performance-based perspective. They were convinced that being in the room was enough to get something done — a lesson 1619 founder Nikole Hannah-Jones is learning now is utter bullshit. So they got their VP (a nice guy and friend of mine.) Which led to setting up an even larger bureaucracy. I was heavily involved — the Director of a good hunk of it was my best friend, and honestly, we did quite a bit of good. Students got through and got degrees, and got jobs.

But back to the staffing situation. After the best were peeled off the right side of the distribution, you were left with depleted pools of demographic variations hostile to the success of their own in-group members. I’ve got stories. But there still was a hiring bias for those minorities inside the university, and at some level in corporate America. But inside the university, increasingly the only white males who could be tolerated were definitely in the ‘beta male’ category. I was already a rarity as a declared Alpha male. So the LGBTQ community subversively took towards assassinating the remnants. They were increasingly in the bureaucratic caste, as well as some of the disordered humanities. They were also not stupid, and heavily recruited, especially from the first generation students, who really just wanted a degree. And if they couldn’t hack the math, they were not going into engineering.

I could go on. But the whole point is that if you think there was some conspiratorial master plan to take over universities, that’s not what happened in the beginning. It was the mathematics of memetic cascades. The end result is we’re now stuck with a lot of mediocre people in academic administration, with not very much to do, that know they could never get a job that pays what they’re getting paid now.

While things STARTED with mathematics, though, that is NOT how things have ended. And how have they ended? With a phenomenon called polyphenism. And what the hell is that? It’s the reason bees that get born in the hive differentiate into workers, kings, and that one queen. They have the same genes. But some combination of epigenetic, hormonal and environmental factors drive biological differentiation.

What is going on now in universities is the cultural variant. Cultural polyphenism is what we’re dealing with. We may have inadvertently selected, through mathematical memetic cascades for more women without kids, which then turned out to be lesbians. But once the lesbians aggregated, we saw a profound political bias that directly came from putting all of them together in a group. We did NOT select for gay males — there is no equivalent on the masculine side of the system. And gay males tend to be more politically spread out than the female side. So we ended up with a hyper-feminine system, that not only sucked in the LGB side, it also gave the gender shape-shifters, the TQ part, the ability to mimic (lots of personality disorders in that crowd, along with narcissistic mirroring) and seize control. Which they did.

At the same time in tech., the demand for research faculties in lesser universities, and the plethora of grad students from places like India, Pakistan, and China, created faculties that are minority white. But they aren’t JUST phenotype-problematic. That’s an easy diversion. People like the provost of Cornell only recently came from India. They are not American, and especially in tech., they do not function the same once you pass a threshold of aggregation that once again triggers cultural polyphenism. It’s gotten so bad, with the decline of at least second-generation Americans in the faculty, that the Indians and Chinese faculty are publicly fighting with each other.

I’m glad I ended my academic career when I did. Why? I had great relationships with my Indian and Chinese colleagues. I toured China, and met with the Dean of Peking University’s engineering college, who we then ended up hiring one of his graduate students. I’ve mentored notable Indian and Chinese scholars myself. But what is going on regarding values will lead to the downfall of the university. Every system has some ability to absorb a certain number of cultural variants. But if you think a primarily Indian faculty is going to service, and more importantly predict the future needs of Americans and American students, you’ve got another thing coming. Their cultures have too many overlaps with the dynamic drivers of university collapse. And while I’ve always felt like my various projects of mentorship were wonderful people, I never counted on servicing the inherent biases in their backgrounds. It’s not just some pick-and-choose smorgasbord, culturally, out there. Core American culture is far superior than most of the homeland cultures these people derive their baseline OS from. And for the majority, that culture is NOT why they came here. They came here for the money.

I could also go on that some of it, towards the end, was a cultural clash with core American values, emblematic in my dogs, which I would take everywhere. If you think a dominant Muslim culture likes dogs, I’ve got news for you. But I digress. Trust me — they trash the bathrooms. It’s gross.

The deeper problem is that all these constituents are authority-driven identity structures. We’re so stuck on phenotypes that we think that kind of thing actually matters. But it doesn’t. The primary commonalities that exist between South Asian and Chinese cultures, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, is that there relational modes are externally defined. The Muslim/South Asian cultures relate to different people inside their communities, as well as the LGBTQ+ communities exactly in the same memetic framework. You are a declared external identity. Agency is low. And because agency is low, folks in the beta male cucks cohort fill out the rest of the hierarchy. And no one could be happier about the collapse of the larger, more genteel hierarchy established literally 100 years ago by their white male forebears. Few of any of these constituencies preserve the passion for particular discipline. They’re happy to declare themselves as professors – the status is what really matters, and if there’s another group out there who’s separate, realms can be established and peace uneasily maintained. In fact, destruction of the overall hierarchy maintains the neo-tribal social structure that makes sense to them. And sense of larger commitment to the larger university prospect is really foreign to the majority. And if the LGBTQ+ group is trying to Queer everything (that’s their term, not mine) all the better to be left alone — especially in the technical disciplines. That collapses the overarching controlling hierarchy anyway, leaving some loose association of confederate states, free to do whatever the hell they want.

The problem is that you end up with the perfect storm. These people do not care about undergraduates hardly at all. Or in a condescending way — servicing them is alternately equivalent to servicing the lower castes, and there’s baked in discrimination there, or in the case of the LGBTQ+ folks, getting them into some frame for perverse sex or genital mutilation, all in the name of reinforcing identity — sometimes permanently.

There’s more to write. But these are the problems that have to be fixed. And the only way they will be fixed is to realize that these problems are real. And they will only be fixed with human evolution of the agents involved.

I do want to end this on a somewhat positive note. I have had a minority of folks in each of these groups who realize there are problems exactly like I describe. Some of them have turned into champions who at least call out the bullshit at the local level, in a way that culturally cuts like a knife. They KNOW what perdition awaits. But we have a policing system inside the university that even squelches those voices. The people in control have divided up the pie. And you’re supposed to be happy and sing for your supper.

Back to Basics — Grounding Validity and Common Sense

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Trip back to the homeland – Portsmouth, OH — in front of the mural wall. Steel mill art in the back

One of the most important elements to understand regarding my work, as well as the confusion extant in most debates in modern society, is the concept of grounding validity. Grounding validity (the noun) or validity grounding (the process) is exactly what the words say — it’s grounding what you observe/believe in your thoughts with what is happening with the outside world.

A simple example — you’re looking at a stovetop. You THINK the stovetop is hot. You touch the stovetop and you burn your fingers. The mental model that stovetops are hot has been validated by your touching it. You are now GROUNDED in the notion that stovetops often can be hot.

Nature/Darwinian evolution has given us a complement of senses with which to establish grounding validity with all sorts of things. We have eyes for visible light, ears that can detect vibrations from 20Hz-20Khz, and other scaled phenomena like sense of smell. On and on. These integrate in the brain to help us make sense of our world. You may LOOK at something that looks like Grandma’s apple pie. But you’ll know it is if you taste or smell it.

Different senses feed different memories into our brains with different levels of persistence. You may witness a complex pattern in a second, but will likely not remember that pattern enough to reproduce it in even 15 minutes. Likewise, apparently, smells are amazingly persistent, and smelling something years later will still stimulate recall of the scene where the smell took place!

Grounding validity can be more complex than just our five senses integrated into an experience, though understanding this opens the door to appreciating why experiences are so important as part of knowledge persistence. Experiences traverse the entire knowledge structure stack, and our brains have evolved to store those in ways we really do NOT understand. As such, when someone tries to tell you a particular theory they have, it’s perfectly VALID to respond “well, not in my experience.” One of the great examples of this that has come out involves “gender affirming care”, which usually involves some version of chemical sterilization or castration, or actual physical mutilation, sold as a cure for adolescent depression. It is, once again, perfectly valid, and grounding to say “well, if someone cut off my testicles, I don’t think that would cure my depression.” The fact that we have to do extensive research and measurements on such a thing is great proof that many in the medical profession have little grounding validity in their practice.

Theories are an important part of how human thought moves forward. But they are only important in the long run if they can be grounded with measurement or experiment. A great example is Hawking’s work on black holes. Stephen Hawking, using mathematics, proposed that black holes could exist. But the evidence that grounded this took another 27 years of radio telescope measurements.

In this piece, I discuss grounding validity in the context of McDonalds, the restaurant chain. Much work has been done by that corporation to statistically improve the uniformity of the hamburgers they produce. Every hamburger you eat from McDonalds will taste like that hamburger in any of their restaurants — or the hamburger you ate ten years ago. That implies that their process is RELIABLE. But their PRODUCT is only valid if people will buy it. And the process of validity grounding matters if you chart their revenue earnings. Currently McDonalds profits are in decline, not because of the reliability of their product. It is because their UNGROUNDED corporate office decided to remove McDonalds’ PlayPlaces — slides and such that kids would play on — because they were germy and had potential injury liability. But McDonalds’ hamburgers were only valid (they’re mediocre hamburgers at best) because of the entire ecosystem of a given restaurant. When they removed the PlayPlaces, they cut a huge part of their market of parents with young children. Apparently, McDonalds, REGROUNDED THROUGH THEIR BALANCE SHEET, are spending some $8.5B in a modernization initiative to create a valid business proposition once again.

What is interesting about the McDonalds’ experience is that while the corporate boardroom was likely regrounded THROUGH their balance sheet, they could have just interviewed customers all along the way and NOT removed the PlayPlaces in the first place. It was deletion of their empathetic system that got them into trouble in the first place. The knowledge structure way to understand this is they created a closed information system which excluded their customers, and they paid the price because they didn’t want to believe that their hamburgers were garbage. As such, they deleted their real asset — the PlayPlace experience — that actually was the reason people came to McDonalds in the first place. It was only when their boardroom realized, by losing money, or as we would say on this blog, got driven down to the Survival v-Meme, that they fundamentally needed to reground their understanding of their business model.

Actually applying some process of grounding validity adds complexity to the knowledge you might base a product development decision on. As I said earlier, actual experience teaches you stuff you might not learn any other way. Take one of my affectations/hobbies — whitewater kayaking.

You can create a kayak in your boat shop, based on whatever theories of fluid mechanics that you may have mastered. But whitewater is a complicated and complex environment. Grounding validity happens when you paddle off the edge of a hard rapid. That environment has tons of coded information that makes it what it is — it grounds your intuition. And if your kayak responds the way you think it should, then that is the experience of validity grounding. And if it doesn’t? Old Daddy River pulls your pants down around your ankles gives you a spanking.

Being aware of a lack of validity grounding, and then using manipulation to change a debate or political view is a prime tool of psychopaths. I’ve written here how psychopaths use food scarcity as a way of convincing you to give money every time you go to the grocery store. In the US, you can walk into ANY grocery store, or down any street, no matter how poor, and see obese people stumbling around. It IS a national crisis. And by doing so, you are participating in your own experience of grounding validity. Availability of food is NOT a problem.

Yet you’ll be told, over and over, what a heartless and cruel administration we currently have (not that it doesn’t have problems, mind you) because the current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has banned purchase of sugary beverages with food assistance money. Whenever I feel poorly motivated to exercise, a trip to Walmart fires up my urge to get on the bike. It is a validity grounding exercise to see the collapse in our nation’s health by looking at the representative population sample of a Walmart on a Wednesday afternoon.

Another one, far less easily grounded, was the march through my engineering clinic of water purification projects for Third World countries. This one is more complicated, involving drilling wells, and various water filtration schemes. It has many redeeming features as an exercise. But grounding validity for all of them hit me square in the eyeballs when I visited remote villages in West Papua, Indonesia. No matter how many wells you might drill, the reality is that everyone drinks bottled water. No one counts on water coming out of the ground as being safe — no matter how many times you might educate for it. So — it might be a great school project. But it is academic.

I recently wrote about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s grocery store proposal for NYC. He was going to start a city-run, discounted grocery store in each of the five boroughs. We can assess the validity of his efforts by drawing from a locus of information on how many grocery stores already exist in the five boroughs. Depending on which AI is doing the counting, we’re into the thousands. So if we look at validity grounding for even the concept of opening city-run grocery stores, instead of them existing as a manipulative tool, we can quickly see that the whole grocery store deal is a psychopathic stunt, distorting people’s worldview to deliver political blame because of the impacts of inflation.

To sum — validity grounding is taking a given piece of information, and then finding something physical that ties that piece of information to reality. And THAT is what creates COMMON SENSE.

I leave you with this famous scene — with multiple instances of grounding validity. From ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’.

Never be afraid to say “that don’t make NO sense!”

P.S. — this is a great piece about one of the empathy pioneers — Franz de Waal and his famous monkey experiments. Greater validity and opportunities for grounding is determined by expanding the system-in-question’s boundaries. It’s really funny — and exhibits how you can twist the truth by cleverly moving those system boundaries around. One last point — what you exclude in your argument often matters more than what you include.

Lindsey Clancy and The Consequences of Valorizing Mental Illness

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci on the Big Joe Beanbag Chair

As I am typing this, I am inundated with the wake of commentary regarding the Lindsey Clancy case. For those reading this in the future, the short version of this horrific tragedy is that Lindsey Clancy was a mother of three young children, including an infant three months old, who systematically strangled all three with a rubber exercise cord, one at a time. There’s no physical rebuttal that she committed this crime. What the case does revolve around seems to be solely about her state of mind when she did this. Was she aware? And though new facts may arise, it appears she was. But the argument is being made that she was having a psychotic break when she killed them, which she then followed by throwing herself off a second story platform, paralyzing herself from the waist down.

What I would like to talk about is a different perspective on how to view not just her situation, but mental illness in general. I would argue that she is a cold-blooded psychopathic killer. But there is a lot of extant noise in the news media that would not just condemn my viewpoint. There is, insanely enough, quite a large body of support for Lindsey Clancy, along with the justification that because she had postpartum depression, she should really be held innocent of this crime.

It is important to note that a fair number of people have put their money where their mouth is. Clancy, as of this writing, has raised north of $1M for her parents, ostensibly to fund their expenses during the trial. Volumes of online support have been generated for the position that somehow Lindsey was not in her right mind, and deserves pity instead of justice.

To be honest, I don’t really care about whatever justification may be generated about Clancy’s innocence. Clancy is a cold-blooded psychopath by any definition, and has forfeited her position and her own right to life in society. What is interesting (pathologically) involves the downstream position of society after what has turned into a very public event. The trial has been declared a mistrial, after apparently, one of the jurors refused to roll on the notion that Clancey was guilty. 10 out of 11 of the jurors apparently thought she was INNOCENT. The jury was composed of 9 women, and 3 men, and as much as we know, it was one man who refused to accept the explanation that she was not responsible for her actions.

Let that sink in.

The deeper problem with all this is the wild precedent that women cannot be held responsible for control of their thoughts if the belief is that they were in some version of a hormonal cycle. And they get to decide.

Believe it or not, this gets back to the issue of what is agency and happiness anyway? If we take the relational perspective of this blog into account, this boils down to the level of psychosocial development of the individual — and how society should view this, especially in edge cases. A better question than “is she a psychopath?” (she obviously was/is) is “what kind of societal constraint would have prevented the brutal murder of her three young children?” Would her hanging have a prophylactic effect towards other crazies killing their kids? It might give them pause.

Right now, the lionization of Clancy, and her probable walk from guilt, is sending a terrible message across society. It establishes that yet another form of insanity, or the claiming thereof, is a divine right given to women. And if society establishes that under most conditions, if a mother is found to have murdered her children, she gets off. This is NOT without mythic historic precedent. The legend of Medea, wife of Jason, hero of the Golden Fleece fame, has her in various permutations, murdering her children. And conditions like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy has all sorts of various “slow murdering” of children as a more contemporary example. With MSBP, mothers slowly poison their children to appear sick to medical service providers for attention. You can read more here.

The problem with normalizing such pathological neurodivergence is that it is a collapse strategy for a society, and as I’ve written about here, a profound tool of OTHER psychopaths looking to find ways to spread anarchy and chaos. And it literally makes no one happy — not even the individual bestowed with some absurd hall pass for insane behavior.

The biggest societal level demonstration of this is probably not Clancy strangling her children. But you don’t have to look far. The trans movement stands as the real icon. The argument for men and women presenting as the opposite sex is couched in terms like “showing up as my authentic self” will somehow make them happy. As long, of course, as the government pays for the self-mutilation necessary for that to occur.

But that ignores the fact that there is some balance related to Internally Generated Self Image and Externally Determined Self Image. The argument, in the case of transgendered individuals, is that their internally generated self image is not incoherent, and if somehow society just allowed them to let their freak flag fly (regardless of larger cost to others in society) they would FINALLY be happy.

But so many of these pathologies count on their taboo nature, even in order to bring orgiastic stimulation to the various disorders of autogynephilia. By society giving in to their disordered requests, the mentally ill are actually more miserable than if they were up in their distressed wive’s closet trying on panty hose. The idea that a crazy person, through virtue of their own insanity, could know what makes them happy is ludicrous. As well as the corollary that society should dispense with constraints that protect other members of society from their incoherence and insanity, because of some fundamental right an individual deserves in their pursuit of calming the cockroaches in their brain. Or hormones. Should women, because of postpartum depression, be relieved of the responsibility to keep their children alive, because they declare themselves a protected class, that needs to strangle infants for peace of mind? There is a sizable contingent of women who seem to think so. Just like there is a nonsignificant cohort of men who believe, in a delusional fashion, that their participation in rituals inside women’s restrooms, is a sacrosanct right.

What we end up with, when we decide to grant such agency to murderers and self-mutilators, is not a more fair and just society. We end up with a society where normalcy of even modest means is in retreat. And the only people in public spaces are crazy. A version of this plot line is going on regarding homeless people in large Blue cities in the US. To go to Portland is to traipse through homeless encampment after homeless encampment. And it might be fine if the homeless were the least bit societally productive. But sooner or later, some contingent of the society has to tote that bale. “Live and let live” might sound fine with doubled over fentanyl addicts. But it’s parasitic to the core.

I think we as a society need to wake up and realize these things. Every dog might have a tick or two on them in the springtime. But there are limits. And like it or not, our modern society is held together by mental coherence. And when you’re killing your own children without consequence, you’re pushing up against societal survival.

Cry not for Jason Arday

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci and Ghillie (aka Squeaky and Squonky) by my favorite cottonwood tree

The latest scandal still ongoing now involves the Cambridge professorship that blew up of Jason Arday, a black Brit, who only yesterday killed himself after being revealed as a serial plagiarist and generalized record manufacturer. Arday had been given a position as a Distinguished Professor at Cambridge in their functional equivalent of race and gender studies in their department of Sociology of Education, in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. It’s very difficult for people outside of the Sausage Factory to understand how little credible work is actually done in Colleges of Education. They are, along with the various diversity departments, the burning dumpster fires of the academy.

They used to be responsible for training teachers, but as time rolled on, and pressure from higher administration grew, branched out into research and general grandstanding. Needless to say, I don’t know a one that didn’t jump onto the DEI-crashing aircraft. And I tried to work with those people in the context of my own career. Two fun facts for those that don’t know who I am — I ran, before I retired, the largest active/problem-based learning engineering clinic in my university system, and raised a ton of money as well. At the same time, I was never contacted to give a seminar nor advise on any education issue outside of my role as the President (or whatever the title was) of the President’s Teaching Academy — a position I held for three years.

And while I maintained some affinity for precious few individuals inside that organ, it was very difficult to hold one’s nose while reviewing the various proposals for internal funding. And lest ye think this was somehow constrained inside my home university, I attended enough engineering education conferences to realize that this rot was across the entire academy. I remember one particular university seminar with a denizen from ANOTHER university (I’m sure they paid her money) where she was expositing on how if students didn’t want to stand up and give presentations in class, professors should respect their wishes and not force them. She then went on to say that SHE was one of those people who had problems presented. She was waxing stupidly on how she was in a poetry class, and loved having poetry read to her, but found the situation where the professor had demanded that all class members also had to, before the end of the semester, stand up and recite a memorized poem to the class as well, as cruel and unusual.

Because I am particularly thick headed (I definitely had late-stage academic burnout by this point) I stood up and asked her, since she was giving a public lecture (and getting a big, fat check for it) how she was able to give a public speech now. She launched into a stream of invective about me being a white male (this was a convenient go-to) and how I could not be cured of my thick-headedness. This seemed perfectly reasonable to the other 100 or so people in the auditorium at the time. No one spoke in my defense.

Never underestimate the lack of courage of people in the academy. Craven doesn’t even begin to describe it – especially in the current milieu of the darker arts of sociology, education and psychology.

Arday was a character, who claimed multiple superhuman feats on his path to both his professorship at Cambridge, as well as his inevitable suicide. He ran some 600 miles in six days, on a broken bone. He was autistic, and didn’t speak until he was 18 or something. The lies go on and on, of course. It’s not that hard to Google them all up. And he also was black. I suspect he was also carrying on with some of the search team that selected him. Such a figure would be intoxicating to them, and a similar set of circumstances also surrounded the last notorious black fabulist, Ian Roberts, the former superintendent of the Des Moines, Iowa, school district. Apparently, he was having an affair with Nicole Price, who happened to be married at the time and basically served as a consultant to the school district that got him the job. No one ever wants to bring up the actual fuckery that often accompanies this type of scandal. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. It will be interesting to see what Cambridge’s internal investigation turns up. Polymarket may disagree, but I’m betting on the sex.

Why, though? While it’s fun to trot out all the old tropes with this kind of a story — and believe me, the tropes keep coming and coming — they are a total distraction for the deep flaws in the actors, as well as the flaws in the system that keep these types of things roiling around. Arday’s trope, of course, was race, and somehow people must hate him and wish for his downfall because he was a black dude. Of course, that might have some merit.

But most of it has shown up after the fact. Academia is a closed society, folks. It’s why so many have gotten away with so much for so long. And academia also has memetic problems. The way status and clout are metered out in the academy is with low empathy externally defined relationships. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rolled my eyes being told that “Provost Blah” or “Vice President Bleh” want to talk to me by their satraps and minions. Meaningless titles matter in the academy, because they’re not meaningless inside the Sausage Factory. What that means is that the academy does not function on reason. It functions on belief. You believe what someone says because they have a fancy title. Not because they actually know something, that makes sense, and you can observe for yourself.

In my case, I was certainly around long enough for those same idiots to know exactly who I was. I remember at one of this nonsensical talks going to fetch a cup of coffee at the seminar coffee bar. Because of my own position, as some kind of lethal faculty weapon, I usually got called in by top leadership — the various Presidents and Provosts — to talk about systemic problems early — a truly ersatz Diogenes.

I remember one particular Provost that was different. She did NOT call me in. She was a classic midwit, and her role at the time was to demonstrate exactly the max you could expect to make if you got an anthropology Ph.D. Which was, as a provost, quite a lot. So she happened to be at the coffee bar at the same time. I stuck my hand out, and probably called her by her first name, “XXX, I don’t think we’ve officially met. I’m Chuck Pezeshki down in MME.” She gave me a look that could freeze ice. “I know exactly who YOU are” she retorted. And then she spun on her feet and walked away.

If you’re familiar with the concept of collegiality — which is kind of a coded geniality all academics are supposed to practice with each other, but has really fallen out of favor in the last ten or so years — you would have seen why we need it. FYI — she is now a President, and has to be making somewhere north of $600K.

But back to Arday. It’s very hard for folks to really understand how someone like Arday ended up in the position he managed to secure, if you’re outside the academy. But it’s really not very hard to understand from the inside. He was in a BS department, in a BS college, that was completely ungrounded, that believes nonsense and has an interest in guarding that nonsense — i.e. making it reliable. Universities love to sell to the public that their mission is discovery of new knowledge. But that has really only been a side hustle in the last 50 years, save for a rare handful of institutional examples. Putting aside all the negative similes my brain could spin forever, what they really do is provide RELIABILITY of knowledge. Universities were/are supposed to take stuff that circulating in the noosphere, and get at to the stuff that is reliable AND reproducible.

So for disciplines that have the Real World at your door, what that means is you set up experiments, grounded in reality, that allow you to test if a given proclamation can hold weight. You then discover results, vet them, and put them through the publishing meat grinder.

But that’s for REAL stuff. Not the Sociology/Anthropology/Psychology fraud factory. Especially in the last 20 years, they’ve been specialized in doctrine. Which is just made-up bullshit. And lacking any real, in your face evidence that things like racism are ACTUALLY happening, or at best, a receding signal, it’s the equivalent of grounding a system to itself. The reliability then turns into who can reliably produce self-reinforcing bullshit. Because that self-reinforcing bullshit is the way you get to the top.

Most of the time. The other way is to produce outlandish, unverifiable claims that catch attention, sound great, that they rely on your “trust me, I lived it” nonsense argument. And who better to produce that than someone like Jason Arday? Who didn’t speak until 18? And was the first black “blah blah blah” who ran 600 miles in six days, and raised a bazillion dollars for charity? It was whopper after whopper. Plagiarism was really just a small part of it – a number inflater. I can’t really think of plagiarism in Arday’s case as actually amplifying the TRUTH of anything. Rather, because of his discipline, he was just imitating someone else’s codpiece. And no, I’m not going to go read all his papers. You go waste your own time.

In systems talk, that kind of effort results in an entire system with positive eigenvalues. What does that mean? It means that the system itself feeds back into itself, creating greater and greater lies. Until the whole thing explodes. Which, of course it did.

But now the issue becomes “who could be so ungrounded? Who could do something like that?” And the answer for that, dear reader, is a special kind of personality-disordered person called a narcissistic fabulist. Here’s the ChatGPT definition:

A narcissistic fabulist is a person who repeatedly invents, embellishes, or substantially distorts stories about themselves in order to construct and maintain an inflated, admirable, exceptional, or victimized identity.

The term combines two concepts:

  • Fabulism — persistent fabrication or embellishment, often involving elaborate autobiographical stories. In its extreme form it overlaps with pseudologia fantastica (“pathological lying”). The stories may contain kernels of truth woven together with invention.
  • Narcissism — a pattern characterized by an exaggerated sense of importance or uniqueness, strong concern with status and recognition, entitlement, and a need to protect one’s self-image. This is broader than the clinical diagnosis narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

What makes someone a narcissistic fabulist, rather than simply a habitual liar, is the function of the fabrication. The stories characteristically support the person’s preferred identity: I am unusually accomplished; I overcame extraordinary adversity; important people recognize my brilliance; institutions have sought me out; my failures resulted from persecution rather than my own shortcomings.

A useful compact definition would be:

Narcissistic fabulist: A person who habitually fabricates or embellishes autobiographical claims in service of an idealized self-image, particularly claims concerning achievement, status, adversity, relationships, or personal importance.

Sound familiar?

_________________________

Now we start running into rough sailing, cognitively. None of this has anything to do with the old tropes. In fact, everything the fabulist produces, content wise, cloaks reality.

And this is where ordinary people start getting into trouble. Unless you are a true Zen master, you’re in the business, when you communicate with other people, of attempting to form shared coherence with what they’re saying and doing. Understanding is the simple word we use to describe this. But it’s really about coherence of information. That means identifying things you DON’T agree with as well, which is why there’s so much discussion on social media about finding ways to disagree and not disrupt relationships (doesn’t work very well.) Why? Because humans are really not just individuals — we are, as my Metamodern friends might say, dividuals. Both socially connected, and independent in our own right. How exactly we form these aggregate selves is the entire subject of this blog. (You know you can use Google on this thing, right?)

But narcissistic fabulists, and their brains, DON’T work on those principles. You, dear reader, are stuck with your humanity and how you understand what being a human is. And you project that out on the people you deal with. The whole Golden Rule is built around it. But narcissistic fabulists are really outside of that paradigm. They are fine, and feel no shame with telling lies and embellished stories (which, you CANNOT know) to you. They may be highly evolved, and doing it on purpose. But maybe not. It could be that their behavior is completely emergent.

And here’s the rub. You CAN’T know. The only thing you know is that this type of person is DOING something to bring more power, control, or resources to them. Or they’re literally just fucking with you. Or trying to boink the members of the search committee. Assuming that they ever, for a red second, feel any guilt or remorse is really not in your favor.

Academia attracts them as well. The sales pitch I used to use to raise money for my engineering clinic involved explains the fundamental narcissistic mechanism used in any classroom.

  1. You teach them some material (any more with a Powerpoint slide.)
  2. You send them away to study.
  3. You call them back in and ask what they think of your ideas.
  4. The students reply “you’re a genius!”
  5. You give them a test to make sure they understand exactly WHY you’re a genius.
  6. You then report back to various people with titles you’re attempting to impress that you’re teaching Critical Thinking.

This is called narcissistic supply. I stopped doing this about seven years into my career. I noticed that while I loved it, and the students loved it, no one was really learning much of anything.

But for a narcissist, the administration gives you an award and tell you that you’re great! And so, at some level, a sizable minority of individuals who have some version of a narcissistic disorder flock to a career doing it like a fly to honey. The physical sciences (engineering being one) have built in feedback mechanisms to kick your ass and keep you humble — or at a minimum, really force you to confront your lies, even if you do it.

But made-up BS like what Arday and others pull off don’t have that. They’re making shit up all the time. As an example, you can ALWAYS find students that will learn if you stand on your head and juggle balloons, and set up some bogus experiment to show that pedagogically this is an improvement. But that really doesn’t mean you’re an effective teacher. (Do note — students love this shit. Trust me — I’ve done my share.)

The problem with a university of like Cambridge is they long ago got high on their own supply. And the more you do this, the more you turn into a Vampire Colony — a group of self-reinforcing narcissists whose primary claim to fame is inventing more and elaborate bullshit. One of the latest trends in academia is making sure all disabled people can access our web pages. What that means is that if you’re blind, you have to be able to see visual web content. At some level, this is a worthy goal — I really don’t want to shut down all research into ways to help disabled folks, and I have done quite a bit of research in that space with various actors whom I consider dear friends.

But there are diminishing returns. Blindness IS a sadness. And sadness is also part of the human condition. But if your administration demands that you produce visual material that blind people can see, you’re going to run into a psychopathic double bind sooner or later.

Back to Arday. Arday had been doing this promiscuous lying his entire career. And the intensity of HOW he did it indicates to me that he was the original model. What THAT means is you CANNOT understand the whole reason he did what he did. And if you decide to waste time on that, well, that’s your business. But there are vanishingly few people with a severe condition like his that haven’t gone on to make LOTS of other people’s lives a living hell. Don’t cry for him, Argentina. Maybe his other sins will come out. But I’ll bet most will not. At the same time, you don’t get to be a narcissistic fabulist and a full professor at Princeton without bullying a lot of people. To show you how difficult all this is, is to process the standard riposte “I don’t feel sorry for him. But I do feel sorry for his kids.” Really. Do you really think someone like this was a good dad? The fact is WE DON’T KNOW. Just remember — Darth Vader was a father as well. NOT a great dad.

The right-wing hordes are indeed swarming over the Arday case as well. But before you decide to throw in with them, regardless of Arday’s misdeeds, it’s important to remember that a good hunk of your allies will also be anti-hierarchicalists. They want to break down the university because, at some level, we’re staring down the barrel of some serious reform. But they also want to derail the primary reason for the university — which HAS NOT CHANGED. And that is to create reliable knowledge for society to use, as well as train people for future employment.

There needs to be a longer piece written on solutions, and I’ll probably write one soon. But lots of these problems are baked in. When it comes to plagiarism, for example (one of the least of the academy’s sins, FWIW) we have amazing tools like iThenticate that scan and find it. These things have been around for at least 20 years. But be forewarned — rigorous plagiarism enforcement will eliminate most foreign scholars speaking a language different than English relatively quickly. And for reasons you wouldn’t want. I’m not going to go into this here now.

The bigger sins in the academy come from its fundamental rigid hierarchical structure. And while a good dose of antiseptic might help clean out some of the chancres, the larger benefit will come from opening up the academy to reality. Which means wholesale elimination of the proliferation of DEI as a driver. Most forces in the academy are hoping that Trump is just an anomaly, and they’re holding out for two more years, hoping (and lying to themselves) that things will just get back to business.

My guess is that we can’t afford our fabulists any more. They’re expensive actors to have.

But we’ll find out. Vampires and their colonies have been in the historical literature forever. We want it to be a bug. But it’s likely a feature.

Is Michelle Obama a Man? (and other psychopathic double-binds)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Boo Boo on a fine summer day

One of the sort-of humorous Internet memes bouncing around in the noosphere is the allegation that Michelle Obama, wife of President Barack Obama, is a transgender male -> female. I don’t particularly take any of it seriously. While I think Barack Obama was actually a terrible President, and accelerated an era in US politics of active deception, I don’t think his wife is a dude. As the Joker would say, “Even for me, that’s cold.”

But it’s still an interesting problem. And a classic example of what is called a ‘double bind’ — a process of psychopathic manipulation used to establish control over people through channeling interpretation through a person looking to dominate a circumstance. I went to ChatGPT for a more normative definition, and this is what the AI said. I don’t use AI much in writing, but this is expository.

“A psychopathic double bind is not a formal diagnosis or recognized term in psychology. It’s a descriptive phrase that combines the ideas of a double bind (from Gregory Bateson) with the interpersonal tactics often associated with psychopathic or highly manipulative personalities.

A useful working definition would be:

A psychopathic double bind is a situation deliberately engineered by a manipulative person in which every available response carries a negative consequence, allowing the manipulator to maintain control, create confusion, or justify further exploitation regardless of what the other person does.

Several features distinguish it from an ordinary double bind:

  • Intentionality. A classic Batesonian double bind can arise unintentionally in dysfunctional families or organizations. A psychopathic double bind is typically constructed on purpose.
  • Asymmetrical benefit. The manipulator benefits no matter which option the victim chooses.
  • Moral inversion. The victim is made to appear guilty, incompetent, or disloyal regardless of their decision.
  • Escape prevention. Attempts to point out the contradiction become further evidence that the victim is “the problem.”

General structure

The manipulator creates two incompatible demands:

  • If you do A, you are condemned for A.
  • If you do B, you are condemned for B.
  • If you refuse to choose, that refusal is itself treated as wrongdoing.

This produces a “heads I win, tails you lose” dynamic.”

The case of “is Michelle Obama a man?” is a classic example of this type of thinking.

  1. If you believe Michelle Obama is a man, it means in a given circumstance that she is to be valorized for being “stunning and brave.” Not only was she the First Lady of the United States, she was the first Trans First Lady!
  2. But of course, we certainly recognize that unless you are in the correct, unplaceable and impossible context, what you’re really saying if you attempt to point out the bulge in Michelle’s trousers, you are actually attacking her femininity, and also declaring her a fraud for having produced (ostensibly) two daughters.

Which it is depends on the manipulation the psychopath wants to use to subordinate your status. I personally think the Michelle Obama situation is borderline ridiculous, because I am not a psychopath. But one of the interesting things I did notice in my teaching career was that any declaration of any race or ethnic category by an older white male (myself) was treated as a racial slur by the class in general, but by the white students in specific. You were supposed to be racially blind, even if you were attempting to move a particular underrepresented minority towards a job opportunity where people were implementing a DEI strategy to increase minority representation.

This was particularly vexing for me because I have a long history of coaching primarily Hispanic students from extremely poor backgrounds, with no professional representation in their immediate family. The actual Mexican or Mexican-American kids had no problem with me standing up and telling them I was available for career consultation (the standard circumstance I’d do for my divination) but as time went on, it became instantiated as a slur if I said it. I was once accused of racism by a group of white students for attempting to wheedle a bag of Christmas tamales from some Mexican-American students I was helping. Do note that THEY thought it was funny. But they also knew their abuelita’s tamales were the real thing.

What this implies is that minority students in a classroom environment, especially if backed by white female students, could have a pocket veto on the professor in a class, as long as that professor was white and male. They would be backed up by a university’s Compliance and Civil Rights office, often in a criminally nonsensical fashion. Though no punishment could ever be meted out for declaring something that we were basically required to divine on our grant applications, that did not stop the institution from basically commissioning their own version of Stasi to create a psychopathic control environment toward speech and interaction with students.

Why did they do this? Now we get back to the N/S axis of civilization. If a university can get a professor to police their own speech, then the institution doesn’t have to. But what it also did was create an environment where the professor/student relationship was also severed, especially if the professor was white, and the student was from a minority or a women student. No one was winning. But that was the point. Do note you can keep going with this, into the domain of Manipulative Reproductive Suppression. By recruiting more poor students, but then disallowing them the mentorship to succeed, which will, dollars to donuts, be provided by older white faculty, you’re still getting your Elite Overproduction goals met of alternately recruiting students into degree programs and taking up slots so that the elites end up having to compete against less students when it really matters – at the end of the line when getting jobs. Wild how that works.

The other interesting part of the phenomenon was if one considered the dichotomy of Independently Generated, Trust-Based Relationships (of which action-drive friendships are a subclass) and Externally Defined, Title-driven relationships, what the entire movement did was place control of those definitions in the hands of the psychopathic clique. That meant that an entire psychopathic contingent could disallow friendships (you can only approach a person XXX ethnicity with a phony script generated by the psychopaths) and only allow, at best, awkward and unfulfilling attachment among the obedient populace. Literally saying that the only relationships that were allowed to exist were under Sauron’s eye. And defined by Sauron himself. Which also develops the training materials that HR forces down everyone’s throat.

So which is it? Is Michelle Obama a dude? If you’re in the outgroup, like Mrs. Robinson, any way you look at this you lose.

Zohran Mamdani’s Grocery Stores – A Tour de Force of Psychopathic Manipulation

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci and Ghillie, Living it up, Truckee River, Reno

One of the most positively insane manipulations the American public has been subjected to in the past year has to be newly elected New York City mayor’s follow-through on a campaign promise to start city-run grocery stores in the five boroughs of NYC. He’s promised five (I’m assuming one per borough) with the notion that the reason, in a land swimming in EBT cards, that the reason people in ostensible NYC food deserts are going hungry is because some failure of capitalism.

The intent of the campaign, of course, is to get people to focus on the whole notion of state-run grocery stores as a viable solution to NYC’s retailing dilemmas. And Mamdani’s been hamming it up — with various press announcements, and him holding up bananas as some secret, exotic fruit that, if reduced in price by 30%, might redeem his ostensibly stunted view of everything that’s wrong with NYC. Here’s a photo from the New York Daily News.

He’s insisted that all staples will be discounted 30% because all the thousands of other grocery stores and bodegas in NYC are raking it in and starving people on that 30% figure. And that somehow, if he opens FIVE stores in the vast expanse of NYC’s retail landscape, that’s going to make any difference at all.

There are the basic facts of NYC — more than half of its denizens are overweight or obese, though this is somewhat less than the national average. And, also not surprisingly, most of those people are poor or lower income. Affluent people aren’t nearly as fat. But honestly, I digress.

What is amazing about this campaign is NOT that they are going to build/remodel/whatever five spots across the massive urban landscape that is NYC. Nor the extremely likely catastrophe of those five stores quickly failing, as they have done in every similar experiment like this. It’s the fact that Mamdani successfully kidnapped the national attention to talk about this ridiculous nonsense. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would know that five stores are a minuscule drop in the bucket of NYC’s retail landscape. But instead, what one gets across the media blogosphere is are endless discussions on communism and failing grocery stores, as well as detailed descriptions of why such a scheme can’t work. No one’s even talking about the fact that if you really wanted to get people reacting, you’d cut off their supply of Nacho Cheese Doritos and Monster drinks. Everyone’s fat, bloated and poor.

Instead, you get endless scheming from the pundit class positing that people will come into said grocery stores and RESELL the bananas that are going for 30% off. Like they’re some kind of designer tennis shoes. You can’t really counterfeit a banana (I don’t think) so these Very Intelligent people are telling us that the best case scenario for any banana grifter is to buy those bananas, take them out and put them on a blanket on 125th Street, and jack up the price 25% so they don’t have to compete with the local bodegas, whom I guarantee sell produce like that on extremely tight margins.

In short — if there even was a real financial angle, it would have to focus on turning Harlem into an open air fruit market, by the wild invasion of Africans looking to make a buck on the back of the local African-Americans. Who, once again, are likely already fat, and could give a shit about paying an extra dollar for their bananas, especially because they already have EBT cards, and can buy bananas to their hearts’ content. What’s wild isn’t just the idea. What’s wild is that the whole scheme is highlighting how easily the pundit class can be distracted, and how THEY believe playing along with Mamdami’s game gives them an opportunity to appear virtuous to the masses.

To be clear — it’s ALL insane, and most importantly, it’s ALL ungrounded. There’s no reality in any of it. But if you can do the space alien thing, which, of course, I am known for, it’s an amazing point of interest to watch people who claim to be smart produce words that have drifted so far from reality that you’ve got to wonder if they ever think through anything at all.

Of course, they don’t, which is why when someone who is an actual position of power — and Mamdani most certainly is — is pulling such a baseline ruse. I’ve written about how psychopaths have been using the whole issue of hunger as a weapon here — or really, the PROJECTION of hunger as a tool to hire phonies in NGOs to distribute raised funds to their crony class that then provides the larger base to really rip the pig off. The real banditry in a big city like NYC is always behind-the-scenes, and having never served in municipal government myself, would require a residency to understand the need for a media/pundit virtue-fest like this to really execute the true Long Con. Which is going on, of course.

But that doesn’t involve sending an intern to a printer to make a 30% off a banana sticker. With a little imagination and place-taking empathy, you can imagine the conversation whoever is the propaganda psychopath and the intern that had to take place. “This would be a lot more convincing if we had a sticker on those bananas with a QR code. That would look super-official!” And then, if you really wanted to lose your mind, imagine that same flack walking out of the office, smugly believing in a job well done. And convinced their $150K salary they were likely making was deserved. WELL deserved.

Mamdani’s bananas, complete with sticker

Your tax dollars at work.

I honestly don’t know how to get people to stop falling for these obvious psychopathic manipulations — trust me again that people will fight over this, and it will cause the usual cascade of gaslighting, and relational disruption, while distracting from something real. But it’s such a simple play in showing how scaling really does matter in understanding how people DON’T understand things, well, I had to write about it. Which is kind of meaning that Mamdani pulled me into the stupidity vortex as well. It reminded me of “don’t notice the gorilla in the background because the woman in the foreground has a great rack” deception that gets played on us all the time.

But here we are.

For those wanting an even deeper dive in how psychopaths use mental models, this piece is more complex, but evergreen.