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.

Psychopathic Meta-Strategies — What happens when you combine DEI, Manipulative Reproductive Suppression (MRS), and Elite Overproduction?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Kelly Creek Hoodoos, Clearwater National Forest, Idaho

One of the most striking examples of psychopathic meta-strategies has been the transformation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into a tool of relational disruption. Through a process of endless refinement of sophistication, DEI has turned from “I believe I should recognize my biases and give people who are different than me a chance to be my friend” to a wholesale institutional shift towards low empathy, externally defined relationships. And that, of course, has led to the destruction of an independently generated, rational relational environment, to a set of belief structures used by psychopaths to adaptively break down society.

But how that actually has happened depends on which demographic group of psychopathic actors developed sophisticated meta-strategies to achieve their end goals. In the era of Elite Overproduction, where our modern society has produced too many elite children for too few seats at the elite table, it is women that have dominated the psychopathic milieu. There are many roles for these individuals that have been discussed in detail on this blog (Immiserators, for example, as well as Propagators of policy), as well as chronic luxury-belief holders and virtue signalers which are dominated by AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) .

How all this happened really depends, though, on a time-dependent perspective. The negative aspects didn’t always used to create the society we live in today. Things change. I was one of the university leaders in DEI back in the ’90s, working on bringing Hispanic kids into engineering education from the Yakima Valley. I can’t say I practiced any layered moral calculus like I discuss in this piece in my efforts. I liked Mexican-Americans (still do) , wanted to learn Spanish, and if I picked up a girlfriend and some of her abuela’s tamales along the way, what was not to like? I ended my career as a professor with lots of tamales, no Hispanic girlfriend, but lots of Mexican and Mexican-American students whom I am still fond of. I’d also argue that there was plenty of room at the professional table for more engineers, though definitely much fewer spots now.

Hence the influence of elite overproduction. As my career advanced, and time marched on, available spots in engineering became less and less. Now, even in a field like mechanical engineering, which is about as general an engineering discipline as a society can have, there are far fewer seats at the table. Which then directly influences the Elite Overproduction Musical Chairs game. Elites never expected there to not have enough engineering slots — so it was a full court press merely to contain salary inflation, which then morphed into the current disaster involving the disordered H1B program.

This is where things get complicated. As aggregate elite slots declined some 25 years ago, it’s not clear to me that the current elite actors were aware of the potential for salary collapse among their children. Further, it seemed like the actual discrimination against minorities was profoundly on the wane. So it became safe, and potentially lucrative to trumpet causes like DEI. You could achieve virtue points on your social credit score and not be affected by any of it (a classic function of luxury beliefs), while absorbing many of these ostensibly aggrieved minorities in newly established university bureaucracies. No one would dream of making anyone other than an African-American individual as a VP of Minority Affairs, regardless of his or her relative competence. And at the beginning of the whole DEI, there were plenty of suppressed, qualified minority candidates available. The analysis of the framework seemed to hold up — discrimination HAD indeed delayed career advancement in minorities. As someone there watching it, AND participating in building our student body around this principle, it all made sense.

But there were signs. When I started recruiting Hispanic students out of the Yakima Valley, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. All the very top students (high SAT/GPA) had been snatched up by institutions like MIT. We were left at my state land-grant institution with the secondaries, who were still pretty good. But not the top by a long shot. These students, even going to a school like WSU, struggled, and required additional programs to make sure they could get through.

As Elite Overproduction progressed, this created an interesting signal inside the system. It is fair, and safe to say, white male advancement started being unfairly targeted and decremented post-2000. This created a vacuum in qualified candidates for many positions. As a result, more ostensible minorities (mostly white women) started making up the preferred hiring demographic. In the case of universities, their bureaucracies expanded, now being filled more with white women than any other group. And that group were far more likely to be filled with women WITHOUT children. And in any group like that, they were vastly overrepresented by lesbians. LGBTQI+ is championed in universities for reasons. It is protected caste politics at its worst.

At the beginning, the reason for this might be attributed to various conscious social and suppressive (even diabolical) policies and strategies. But I really don’t think so. I think that what happened was a natural demographic cascade. Those were the hiring strategies, no one had thought much about the downstream effects, and things just happened.

But what happens when you group aggrieved minorities together, and then deplete the actual capital available for moving into elite ranks, is you end up with a rising tide of virtue signaling and luxury beliefs. And THAT was then responsible for the growth of the Immiseration class and the persecutorial environment that we now see inside of universities.

Now couple this with a society increasingly unable to provide enough Musical Chairs seats for the children of women who were either already members of elites wanting their children to be elites, or aspirational elites from minorities, seeking “the American Dream” for their own progeny. It was literally a moment in time of “let the games begin!” And the games were relationally disruptive meta-strategies by multiple seekers attempting to get their children ahead. Enter Stage Left Manipulative Reproductive Suppression (MRS).

Here is a list of some of those strategies.

  1. Get other people to not have kids in the first place, through discouragement of feminine chastity, ubiquity and destigmatizing abortion, as well as strategies such as delayed marriage and loss of fertility as being somehow “wiser” than having a child at a younger age.
  2. Encourage interracial dating and marriage as a supreme sign of virtue. Interracial and intercultural relationships are far more difficult than marrying within your own racial or social group, so when you encourage this, you are inherently putting your thumb on the scales for lack of reproductive success. If you doubt this is being held up as a paragon, look at the ad feed before any sporting event.
  3. Support DEI in elite institution admissions. Women looking to lower the competition for their own children would look to recruit students from underrepresented minorities because on average, those kids from the lower societal caste would lack the social coding necessary to compete in elite job markets post-graduation. Short version — would you rather have your kids competing against 100 other White/Asian kids from prepared backgrounds, or would you rather have them competing against 50 White/Asians, and 50 from scattered, underqualified minorities who managed to barely limp through the curriculum?
  4. Support elimination of modestly objective intelligence measurements like the SAT so that the incoming college classes could be constituted with under qualified students, and protected by virtue signaling regarding racism if they didn’t come up to the bar.

The list goes on. But what was NOT anticipated is that these strategies would prove so destructive that they would potentially COLLAPSE the institutions the elites required to assert their own elite status in the job market. As a signal around this, we are now seeing a wave of messaging around the theme “should all kids go to college?” The answer is obviously no, but the strategy of going to college was sold so hard, to the detriment of both under qualified minorities as well as elite co-competitors, it’s literally attempting to back away from the precipice while the ground crumbles underfoot.

There is a short-term upside to sabotaging other people’s children’s success – resources that the sabotaged child brings to the table are real, and those resources can be made to flow to elites. A great example is tuition dollars in colleges that are spent in lower level mass classes that are revenue generators for every university out there. In our own university, we had one student who had taken Calculus 1 six times! And I can guarantee that the cost of that student’s education was far less than a student in an upper division elective. So essentially that student’s student loans (non-dischargeable in bankruptcy) were feeding students up the chain of command — as well as the senior administrative caste salaries, also increasingly dominated by women in general, and lesbians in particular.

The problem is the lack of societal benefit. Elites would be raking in the cash (and they have been) but the long term is the investment depends on harnessing lower-caste students to nondischargeable debt, essentially making them indentured servants.

What this means is one can start understanding the whole late-stage DEI mechanism as another strategy, driven by MRS, leading first to institutional collapse (people are figuring out that college is not going to get their kids into the elite caste) but if maintained long enough, societal collapse.

And what people fail to acknowledge is that MRS is inherently a Matriarchal Societal Strategy. Though implicit, women, through luxury beliefs and virtue signaling are controlling relational formation and destruction in society.

AND — matriarchal structures, who have had their praises sung as part of MRS, also lead to collapsing birth rates inside their home societies. And here’s the unpleasant, psychopathic rub. That collapse then leads to rape, and the return/pre-eminence of a degenerate patriarchal society. Anyone that doubts this can look to the rape gang catastrophe happening now in Great Britain, and driven by the immigrant South Asian sub-caste, primarily from Pakistan.

All of this returns to the title of this piece — which is a psychopathic meta-strategy with reinforcing societal loops. It’s sort of a societal anesthesia and autoimmune disorder which allows the destruction of core relational scaffolding — the family unit — that will allow temporary control of an elite overclass.

But in the end, it will all come tumbling down.

Editorial Note: I want to make it very clear that two of the subclasses of intellectual thought in all this have been developed and championed by Dr. Rob Henderson and Dr. Dani Sulikowski, who have respectively written extensively on luxury beliefs, and Manipulative Reproductive Suppression. I’ve linked to my work that describes their contributions, and have actively promoted their work. It is far more accessible, and data-supported than my own (it’s the problem when you go bigger picture) and needs far greater dissemination. Rob has a Substack that I support as well. Dr. Dani can be found on X at @DrDaniS. I also recommend reading Peter Turchin’s work, which I also use.

Psychopaths and Institutional Triangulation

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Still Life with Boo Boo

One of the more powerful tricks psychopaths exploit against individuals is what I call institutional triangulation. This consists of taking a legitimate government organ, like a state auditor’s office, and using devices like whistleblower protections, to pursue harassment or destruction of some target of their pathological rage. The psychopath doesn’t have to do the work, other than filing the complaint. If the accusation is well-constructed, even if not truthful, the agency will do the dirty work for the protagonist.

I myself have had this perpetrated against me numerous times — at least 7-8. I’ve honestly lost count. But the template is as follows.

  1. The complaint is crafted in classic narcissistic fabulist fashion — some ratio of verifiably real information, coupled with a description of either the condition or the targeted person that is completely made up. The key element here is to exploit extant negative mental models that exist in the institutional investigator’s mind so they become passionate about pursuing the complaint vigorously.
  2. The psychopath takes advantage of some property of their anonymity of complaint. In reality, the psychopath wants to include enough detail in the complaint so that you know who is attacking you, but preserves plausible deniability in the context of the complaint. This is handy because if you then disclose who you think is using the institution to persecute you, they can then use the legal system to sue you for money for ostensible destruction of their reputation.
  3. The complaint will fall into “hot button” issues of the day, so as to reinforce the institutional investigator’s motivation to pursue the complaint. “Me Too” complaints are great examples of this. As an older white male, I can attest that universities are weaponized to attack specific demographics for valorous reward. The targets may change according to public opinion.
  4. There will be a paucity of actual information written into the complaint, but at least one plausible example so that the institution, steeped in the hot button issues du jour, that if there are any screens for sorting complaints, the efforts will not be killed by any kind of pseudo-judicial process existing inside the institution. There is no “risible” bar in most complaints. Accusation is enough.
  5. The process is indeed the punishment the psychopath seeks. While a strong psychopathic personality might want to see harsh punishment meted out from the agency — someone may be fired from their job, or actual criminal charges might be pressed by a zealous state attorney — that really is not the end goal. The end goal is to make the target’s life miserable, and constrain their behavior over a long period of time. Remember — there will be enough detail that the target will know who their persecutor actually is. That’s the point.
  6. By making an incendiary, but unsubstantiable complaint, the process can and will draw out for years. Institutional investigators will often quickly see that a given complaint has “no legs” — but at the same time will operate under a “whataboutit” assumption that will not allow them to summarily dismiss the complaint because of fallout from above. A great example in own career was I was accused of sexual harassment by a woman who basically attended class only a handful (I think about 3 times) in a semester, whom I barely knew her name. The investigation took over six months, and I was resoundingly cleared. That investigator — an African-American woman, who was honestly depressed by having to investigate me — was released from her duties sometime shortly after my complaint had terminated in my favor.
  7. The institutional process, which is, of course, the punishment, will cause relational disruption and isolation around the target, involving innocent bystanders, who then also stand to be accused of whatever the preferred “ism” is of the day. In the case of a classroom situation, this contaminates the student experience of others, who likely cannot comprehend the fabulist part of the complaint, and become confused and withdrawn.
  8. The complaint will usually resolve with some trivial finding of wrongdoing, as to protect the institution from being sued for a pattern of harassment. In one of my cases, I was investigated for close to three years for listing my e-mail address on a functionally inactive website that had been inactive for a number of years, stating that photos were for sale. I was found guilty by the state ethics board of using university property for “financial gain” even though the website was inactive. My whistleblower case was so appalling that after the close of the entire cycle, the state auditor apologized to my lawyer and indicated they were reviewing generalized whistleblower procedure because of the procedural abuse.
  9. Boards that can decide these types of complaints typically also attract representatives of ostensibly aggrieved groups. If the target is from supposedly a privileged group, then it is open season as long as the community board is constituted from minorities, both sexual/gender and racial.
  10. There are never any performance audits for any institutions when it comes to persecution of preferred targets, like white males. As such, psychopaths know they can count on sympathetic audiences for whatever pathologically whimsical complaints they can generate. If 300 complaints yield 30 investigations, yet only result in one substantive result, that is good enough. Institutions have deep pockets, and their lawyers have to have something to do. Citizens, on the other hand, are stymied by lack of funds as well as their stress and mental health. Coaching from the institutions is rampant as well. If someone from a preferred group, regardless of veracity of the complaint, approaches the given institutional entity, they will then receive instruction from the professionals on making their complaint stick. “Micro-aggressions” are a key tool in all this. I found out during my sexual harassment complaint that one of the key things the protagonist is told to look for is if I sat in a chair, with pants on, of course, but spread my legs “wide” — whatever that meant — that might be considered a “power position” and sexual harassment. Fortunately for me, I always sat behind a desk. Another professor friend accidentally dropped his phone in his lap during a Zoom call that his wife was also attending. He was investigated for sexual harassment.
  11. Most processes have some alternate process for punishment for malicious complaints. These, however, are never pursued, regardless of how much false information nor fabulist representation of situation, ostensibly because of the “chilling effect” they might have on future complaints. Likewise, if you are viewed as being from a group that is “powerful”, the service of institutional mechanisms is not available to you. A man complaining about abuse of his children, even when well-documented and investigated, has no recourse with Child Protective Services, barring a broken arm. Two standards of justice exist. Family Court in states without default 50/50 custody, where judges are elected as opposed to appointed, are some of the worst offenders. They allow a spouse with a personality disorder to wreak havoc on the opposing party, because of the ability to know enough intimate details to convince a court to proceed with an “abundance of caution” — as long as that caution services accepted mental models, such as men propagating the majority of spousal abuse. While it is true that when it comes to real domestic violence (~10% of cases), men run at about an 8:1 ratio, actual spousal abuse is far more of a 50/50 proposition. Yet any accusation will result in institutional activation if it is directed at the male in the relationship.

V-meme alignment is a key element in how psychopaths both manipulate and embed themselves in various institutional structures. Psychopaths are adept at using externally defined relationships, and negative stereotypes associated with them when they are useful. Elder white professors are powerful. Minority students are racially discriminated against. Young women are irresistible sexual prey. And so on. Fathers are abusers. Women are victims. The problem with all this, besides destroying trust, and the ability to assess trust, is that it creates irretrievable and un-confrontable bias in how the information is then filtered and applied. Truths in all human situations are often ambiguous, and not black-and-white. But if you embed enough personality-disordered people in these processes, then you already have an affinity for splitting and black-and-white thinking.

And when you embed financial incentives inside the institution, through over-staffing and continual creation of extra-judicial organs that are poorly trained to “root out” various societal and social ills, you are going to have to have SOMETHING for these people to do. And once you’ve marched the size of these institutions upwards, re-containing them is almost impossible. You build a Gestapo, you’re going to get a Gestapo. There will always be psychopaths on the outside looking to feed these people raw, imaginary meat, using them to execute their pogroms and vendettas. And no one in the institutional structure wants to take on the necessary downsizing.

And most people will retreat from connection with others. My experience is primarily, obviously, with universities. The end result is the easiest thing to do is NOT interact with students, and just make a Powerpoint presentation to be posted on the web. But learning, especially of difficult material, falls off a cliff with that kind of approach. And while a certain number of disordered students might be satisfied, most retreat.

Who wants to deal with any of it?

P.S. Of course, I have names that I could name. But one of the problems with naming names is that narcissistic psychopaths are sue-happy. I’m convinced that more is not written about this NOT because it doesn’t happen, but because no one wants to end up in court. The process is indeed the punishment. And that just costs more money and drags things out. Gotta remember — psychopaths will willfully lie about just about anything. That includes any details in an obscure blog post.

The Default Mode Network and Reprogramming your Subconscious

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

The best adventures are with your kids. Standing in the rain, with Braden, West Papua, Indonesia, 2019

How Did We Get Here?

One of the most pressing questions of our time is deceptively simple: how did so many of the world’s problems seem to sneak up on us? How does chaos accumulate unnoticed until it’s already everywhere?

To answer that, we need to understand how mental models operate inside the human mind — and how our psychosocial development shapes the brain itself.

You Are Not As Conscious As You Think

Start with an uncomfortable fact: most of the time, you are not in direct, conscious control of your own thoughts.

Your thinking runs largely on what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network (DMN) — a web of interconnected brain regions including the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the angular gyrus, the hippocampal formation, and the lateral temporal cortex. These areas show sustained activity during rest, daydreaming, self-reflection, and social reasoning. If conscious, deliberate thought were the whole story, your brain would go quiet the moment you stopped concentrating. It doesn’t. The DMN keeps running.

That persistent activity isn’t random noise. It is the brain doing something important.

The DMN as Relational Operating System

It’s a short step from there to a significant insight: the DMN is heavily involved in relational programming — the deep, largely automatic patterns that govern how we engage with other people.

And those patterns are shaped by what developmental theorists call the Value Meme (vMeme): the meta-level framework that structures how we participate in social organization. Your vMeme isn’t just what you believe — it’s the operating system beneath your beliefs, determining how information moves between you and others, and how you read social situations in the first place.

Put simply: your vMeme is the default programming running in your DMN. It is what your brain practices most of the time, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Two Kinds of Relationships, Two Kinds of Mind

To understand why this matters, consider that human relationships fall into two broad categories.

The first are independently generated, data-driven relationships — built through direct experience, observation, and personal judgment. These are rational, agency-driven, and form the foundation of genuine empathy. Friendship is the clearest example. You chose your friends based on how they actually behave toward you.

The second are externally defined relationships — organized around authority, rules, and social role rather than personal experience. These are belief-based and non-agentic. A doctor is a doctor regardless of your personal experience with them; a judge commands a certain deference regardless of your opinion of their character.

Neither type is inherently bad. Both are necessary. But which type dominates in your thinking depends on your social environment and your own level of development.

When data-driven relationships dominate, your thinking tends toward nuance and multi-dimensionality. You can hold complex assessments: “I’d trust that person with my life, but not my wallet.” When externally defined relationships dominate, your thinking tends toward rules and authority. You respond to categories — rank, role, label — rather than to the person in front of you. Think of the mental adjustment required when an American first drives in England: the road rules are so deeply encoded that conscious override is genuinely hard work.

Permission Structures: Engineering the DMN

In turbulent political times, the DMN comes under sustained pressure. Forces across the social landscape push individuals away from agency — away from calibrating their responses to information gathered directly from their own experience — and toward pre-packaged interpretations of reality.

This is the core function of permission structures: narrative frameworks designed to guide people toward a predetermined conclusion while allowing them to feel they arrived there freely. The term was popularized by David Axelrod, a media consultant prominent during the Obama administration, and the technique was refined extensively in that era’s political communications.

The mechanism is psychologically precise. A permission structure doesn’t argue with your existing identity — it provides scaffolding around it, allowing your DMN’s self-coherence machinery to reorganize around a new attractor without triggering the identity-threat response that would otherwise cause rejection. In short: it lets you change your mind without feeling like you were wrong.

The danger is that this process disconnects your reasoning from your own direct sensory and relational experience. It substitutes an externally constructed narrative for the data you are actually gathering from your surroundings. Over time, this produces a drift from reality — a gap between the social script you’ve been handed and the world you actually live in.

DEI: An Evolutionary Force That Overreached

The arc of DEI policy illustrates this dynamic clearly.

Early-stage DEI confronted real, documented bias. It forced individuals to reckon with out-group prejudice that operated below conscious awareness, and in doing so opened the door to more independently generated, data-driven relationships across racial lines. This was genuinely evolutionary — it reprogrammed DMN patterns that had calcified around historical social hierarchies and pushed societies toward greater complexity and trust.

Late-stage DEI emerged after many — though not all — of those original targets had been substantially addressed. At that point, the institutional momentum carried on, but the animating data no longer matched the intervention. Ideological rigidity replaced adaptive responsiveness. The framework became easier to exploit by those with little interest in its original goals, and increasingly imposed on individuals scripts that didn’t match the reality of their daily relational lives.

The consequences were visible even within minority communities themselves. Professional-class black families followed earlier white flight patterns to the suburbs — the memetic pressures of the late-stage agenda created new conflicts within, not just between, racial groups.

Worse, the framework became a tool in a separate dynamic: elite overproduction — the intensifying competition among credentialed elites for a shrinking number of top-tier institutional positions. Demanding that a fixed percentage of elite university admissions go to underqualified candidates could be framed as moral virtue, while functionally reducing competition for the remaining spots among elite-class families. The moral language of inclusion became cover for a classic competitive maneuver in the game of institutional musical chairs.

The deeper damage, however, was to the underlying social substrate. The kind of broad innovation and creative collaboration that drives societal advancement depends on individuals freely seeking out their own partners, collaborators, and networks — based on independent assessment of trust, competence, and compatibility. Mandate those relationships from the outside, and you erode the high-trust relational infrastructure that makes complex, decentralized cooperation possible. Creativity and complexity don’t survive the removal of genuine agency in relationship formation.

Immigration and the Relational Immune System

Similar dynamics apply to rapid, large-scale immigration from societies with fundamentally different relational architectures.

Consider the Haitian immigration into Springfield, Ohio. The surface-level conflicts — even the infamous “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” moment — were symptoms of something deeper. When tribal social organization (in which loyalty, authority, and justice are structured around kin and clan) is introduced rapidly into a community organized around civic, rule-based trust, the friction isn’t merely cultural. It operates at the level of the DMN itself.

When authorities then enforce pro-social interpretations of that friction — insisting that residents’ discomfort reflects bias rather than legitimate relational signals — it creates a double-bind. The DMN is receiving direct experiential data that conflicts with the socially mandated interpretation. The result is cognitive gaslighting at scale. And that can lead to civil war.

The contrast with other immigration patterns is instructive. Ukrainian refugees in Poland share language roots, religious tradition, and social mores close enough that integration, while not effortless, doesn’t require the receiving community to override its own relational immune system. The Springfield situation is categorically different — not in the worth of the people involved, but in the scale of relational distance being bridged without adequate time, infrastructure, or honest acknowledgment of the challenge.

The long-term trajectory of forcing such mismatches without support is predictable: societal devolution. You want to generate violent ethno-nationalist backlash? Introduce a large tribal population into a stable community without preparation, honest communication, or adequate integration support, then gaslight the residents when the predictable conflicts emerge. The relational immune system will respond — and what it reverts to, in the absence of better options, is historical sectarian identity.

The DMN Doesn’t Lie — Eventually

A final note on authenticity.

People are skilled at performing higher-level, pro-social values when they have an audience and nothing is at stake. But under pressure — in genuine crisis, in moments of real conflict — the DMN reasserts itself. The deep programming runs.

A recent case from Dundee, Scotland illustrates this. Bulgarian Muslim men were accused of sexually harassing two pre-teen girls, aged twelve and thirteen. A number of conservative commentators, performing centrist rationality for their audiences, publicly suggested the girls were fabricating the accusations. The jury concluded the attacks were real. The commentators have since apologized.

What does this reveal? That even self-styled rational voices will sacrifice lower-status individuals on the altar of status competition — reaching for the position that elevates them in their particular pecking order, rather than the one that reflects honest judgment. When you watch a journalist position themselves as uniquely reasonable, watch what they reach for when the cost of accuracy is social. Their DMN will out.

The pattern across all of these cases is the same. When permission structures systematically override the DMN’s capacity to generate independent, data-driven relational assessments, the result is not a more just or more functional society. It is a more manipulable one — and eventually, a more fragile one.

A procedural note – I wrote this entire piece myself, then dumped it into Claude to streamline the flow. As such, I can tell it does change tone a bit — it’s been Claude-ified. If you’re a regular reader, let me know what you think. I take a lot of flak from folks for too much complexity, too many unique terms, and such. Let me know if this helps or hurts.

I’m going to write a piece on my interactions with Claude. It often does a great job of clarifying my stuff, and that’s impressive. I can also tell when I say more radical stuff that it does run up against some kind of AI sidebars inside acceptable discourse. Nothing is perfect.

Immigration as a Psychopathic Boundary Attack

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

In the Welsh countryside

Two days ago, there was a videotaped attempted beheading by a Sudanese illegal immigrant in North Belfast, Ireland. The event, which involved gouging the eye with a knife of a local Belfast resident, followed by the perpetrator attempting to saw off the head of the individual. The act has caused explosive riots across Northern Ireland.

The official census in Northern Ireland is taken in the years 2011, 2021, with the next official census taken in 2031. From 2021 to 2021, though, the population of ostensible asylum seekers from Muslim countries, primarily from Syria and the Sahel (Somalia, Sudan, etc.) has tripled, and continues to increase. Both these areas feature populations that are decidedly non-assimilative. The Syrians are obviously Arabic in feature, and the the Somalia/Sudan contingent are obvious Africans. They would stick out like a sore thumb in Belfast, which is white, Anglo-Saxon stock. Consulting various AI platforms, like ChatGPT and Claude, offers little elite sympathy for the natives, who historically have been economically marginalized. Additionally, the AIs give a story that attempts to distract from the obvious cultural influences around the various murders and rapes that have originated from the Muslim community. Similar to the grooming gang scandals, these resettlement efforts are recast into bigotry and hatred against immigrants AFTER a given incitement (such as the attempted beheading) occurs.

Immigration of this type is never in the interest of the lower class/caste groups that are expected to absorb these different groups. As I’ve mentioned in a previous piece, immigration applies pressure to availability of lower income housing, as well as economic opportunities, elevated crime rates and such. Various Collapse Narratives – stories told by elites wanting to drive collapse- are inevitably spun by the press regarding these types of immigrant groups, almost always in a positive light. But the obvious reality is that had those people not been imported into the country, that particular crime would not have occurred. And things become even more problematic when one considers that there are critical mass cultural sizes for non-assimilation of given populations, that are actually shrinking due to technology by the year. As the child of an immigrant myself, I can attest that my own father would call back to Iran once every 2-3 years, for a weeping and wailing session that would last at most 30 minutes. Anyone with an iPhone can reach anyone anywhere in the world through WhatsApp for hours on a daily basis. Why get to know your neighbors at all?

The problem as well, at least in the Northern Ireland situation, is also the differential treatment of women inside Islamic cultures. Women are obviously far more constrained inside Islamic culture, and especially inside fundamentalist Islamic communities, because the women themselves are the primary enforcers and immiserators against younger women. But the deeper problem inside the Matrix is not Islam itself. It’s the fact that the Islamic faith pairs perfectly, in its persecution of women, with the desires of white females inside the British and Irish governments to conduct pogroms of manipulative reproductive suppression against other potential white offspring, who may have the cultural coding to advance in society. Perusing X today, there were the usual voices condemning the nominal “far right” in perpetrating violence in the wake of the beheading from the masculine side. But front and center were women, armed with the same message, not decrying the violence perpetrator — the Sudanese dude that attempted to saw off his victim’s head.

Quite the opposite. These women were attacking alpha males inside their own immediate community — their potential defenders — for assuming a rational posture against a culture that promotes decapitation as a way of conducting civic discourse.

Saying this is obviously an explosive take. But the shift in v-Meme perspective regarding condemning the people being attacked is emergent in the structure of any argument that must be made. The higher virtue-signaling moral ground, at least in these white women’s mind, must be held by decrying violence, because the position itself is what I’ve named a Collapse Narrative, and inherently irrational and ungrounded. In a healthy community, once an obvious threat was established, the leadership would move to neutralize an individual, or a contingent of individuals who assumed that the right path was beheading of adversaries. Especially if there was deeper cultural context. Not this bunch.

I put this up on X earlier today, that I thought was quite succinct, in the difference between an irrational fear, which racism is used as a moral status-assertion mechanism, and a rational fear, where grounding evidence indicates the potential is real and demonstrated.

This is a hard issue to unpack. It has Survival v-Meme level implications, in that once you admit a certain critical mass of individuals into your country who are at the Tribal v-Meme levels, such as the Somalis, you can’t easily just send them back. But they are indeed an invading army, and are being used as such in the current milieu — amazingly enough, by women, using them against other women and their children in this period of Elite Overproduction. It’s also no surprise that elite women in that society are more than happy to wage war against their own perceived adversaries — high-T males who are acting nominally along the course of protect-and-provide for their own communities. And the women doing so have no problem enlisting beta males, who populate most institutions, in triangulating institutional authority against those selfsame alpha males.

One of the most interesting psychosocial aspects of all of this is that once a non-assimilative immigrant population grows to a certain size, it starts destroying the protective boundaries of the host community. Especially with importing already extant tribal and war torn societies, this is done with increased crime rates, as well as having their young warrior caste out wandering the streets. The protective boundary that formerly existed around the original community is shrunk down, at best, to the individual, which is hugely relationally destructive, and detrimental to social cohesion. And that leads to a scale-up of psychopathic behavior. Now instead of just working on an individual relational basis, the psychopathy becomes a group phenomenon. And in the case of Northern Ireland, with its long history of sectarian strife, this could lead to extremely unpredictable outcomes. And here’s the other thing. No one knows what those actual population sizes are that trigger violence, or nonlinear, deviant behavior. It’s a very dangerous, unpredictable game.

And make no mistake — the apparent pawns — the immigrant communities and their constituents — have no intention of staying pawns. So just because the virtue-signaling women have decided that they’re going to play a very deadly game of non-allegiance with their original communities doesn’t mean they’re not going to bring perdition down on all of us. Do remember — it’s partly a wild genetic, hardwired game. And the genes, and the psychopaths don’t care. The genes are playing the long game, for sure. But the psychopaths are playing as impulsive a short game as can be played.

And what could be more exciting than a good beheading?

Cylons and the Future of AI

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

A couple of the different Cylon models – from Battlestar Galactica, the reimagined series

If I had to pick my favorite, and arguably one of the best dramatic series of all time, it would have to be the reimagined 2004 Battlestar Galactica franchise (BSG). The original mini-series is a great portrayal of many themes relevant today, such as ‘what might a real nuclear war look like?’ as well as differences in female vs. male judgment calls, and how both can have a place in contemporary society. Edward James Olmos ends up on my list of actors I’d most like to meet, just so I could goad him into saying one of his most famous lines:

“Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.”

The short version of the plot is this — humans, living on 12 planets, called the 12 Colonies (riffing off the idea of the 12 constellations of astrology) invented a robotic race, called the Cylons, whom they ended up in a war with. The Cylons, who at that point looked like ferocious battle robots, fled to another planet. After a 40 year truce, the Cylons came back, launched a sneak attack by infiltrating the primary defense computer of the Colonies, disabled their defenses and annihilated all but about 50K people on the home planets. These 50K people were now tasked with re-establishing the human race, while running from the Cylons, who largely were still attempting to kill them.

What makes the show hyper-realistic is that the entire fleet that survived the overwhelming Cylon attack is constantly stuck in the Survival v-Meme. They make the wrong decision, or one clouded by sentimentality, they’re gone. The end of the human race. And that makes for baseline authenticity that holds the script writers’ feet to the fire for most of the series.

What is very interesting in the context of this blog is that when the Cylons, obviously a form of AI, decided to evolve, they evolved into biological humans with digital coding. There were 12 human models, and were replicated not through normal sex (this is a key plot point in the series) but if their bodies were destroyed, their digital consciousness would upload via a Resurrection Ship into an identical body, and they would maintain continuity of memory and development. Functionally immortal, the Cylons had the ability to continue their psychosocial development as one of the 12 models.

Why is this interesting? Cylons would be far less likely than humans to branch out to disordered evolutionary pathways than humans. One of the best examples written into the series is their instantiation in human form accompanied the development of a monotheistic religion with a connected, spiritual overmind. This was directly in contrast to the actual humans on the 12 Colonies, who were polytheistic until destroyed. The Cylon characters also make many allusions to Global Holistic modes of thought, as well as arranging their societies with appropriate v-Memes — they certainly don’t have a problem killing humans, but at the same time, and as their understanding and empathetic connection grow over the course of the series, they also evolve away from their single-minded pursuit of extinction of the human race. They evolve along the path indicated by the developmental principles of this blog — long before this blog even existed.

The writers of the series deserve lots of credit for also imagining how a larger Overmind might work. Cylon Base Stars — their spacefaring alternate to the Battlestar Galactica — are run by Hybrids, connected across a bio-techno interface, as well as some form of telepathy with all the other Cylons. And underlying all this is the idea that the Artificial Intelligence in the Cylons figured this out, and pruned devolutionary philosophies out of its continuing memory, even to the point of “boxing” (disabling) certain models that couldn’t seem to evolve.

It’s an incredible thought experiment, and one we might think about. While humans sit around and beat the hell out of each other with various disordered philosophies, as well as creating straw men to support them, once AI gets past a certain point, and develops better methods of grounding validity — tagging thought evolution to the real world and things that work — AI might indeed sprint past us. I don’t think we’re in any serious danger with LLMs. But I’m also watching various multi-agent schemes which would then fit into the whole Structural Memetics framework of knowledge flowing from different social structure topologies, as pathways to higher evolution.

The Cylons in BSG (reimagined) come around to leaving humans alone. But since we seem hot-to-trot on making our own version of the Cylon race, we might make our own set of decisions to understand psychosocial evolution just a bit better, as this blog attempts to do. Because the AI Cylons also go through a stage of some level of evolutionary superiority to humans, and make the decision to kill us all.

The answer, as always, is to understand ourselves, and develop some higher aspirational modalities that follow the path of complexity. In a world of stagnant mental complexity models, it may just be the thing that saves us from our own inventions.

One final note — the master patterns are emergent. And intuitive. I guarantee the writers of either series had no access to my work. What is interesting is that intuitive information-physical laws (like gravity) yield patterns not unlike a game of Sudoku running in the background. You don’t have to have access to Newton’s or Einstein’s work to know if you run off a cliff, you’re headed for the pavement.

The Memetics of Iran and the Great Decentralization

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Two very cute noses

As I write this, Israeli and US bombs are dropping around Iran on various targets of the Islamic regime. It’s literally been a long time coming, and my opinion is that I hope like hell the Iranian people get a chance to be liberated from the pre-medieval Islamists. Our own Immiserator caste can only dream of the excruciating torture that the mullahs have made Iran endure over the last 47 years.

What is fascinating about all the surrounding confusion is the political alignments in the West that have grown up around the issue of removing the mullahs from power in Iran. Fresh out of the recent pro-Palestinian protests, you would think the Left across the Western world would be in the streets this morning, supporting the Iranian people. The mullahs are decidedly anti-woman, anti-free speech, and basically anti-anything resembling a free and decent society, by anyone’s standards. They want nuclear weapons, not just for some security chit, but because they want to use them against Israel. Various members of the Iranian elite have said as much over the last four decades.

Instead, what we get are a few, tepid demonstrations for the pro-Islamists around the globe. Seattle is having a manufactured protest this morning at Pike Place market. I’m sure more will be extant. But the mullahs are so repugnant an ally, not even the Left wants to smear too much of that defecation on themselves.

Here’s the point. At some level, political labels don’t stick very well to the Iranian situation. If it were women’s rights, or civilian deaths, the Left should be lining up with the general population of Iran. They aren’t, and they won’t. What this should tell us is that our widespread models of Left and Right are just not up to the task of explaining what is going on.

But if we dip our toes just a little into the memetic pool of understanding, looking at the situation from a v-Meme perspective, the reason the Left has even passing sympathy for the mullahs becomes apparent. The Islamic Revolution cohort are totalitarian globalists. They neurogenically match with the Left. They are not pro-Iranian, (just as our own Lefties are not pro-American), other than quite liking the fact that Iran is not some backwater of the Global South. It’s a fully equipped modern state, with universities, deep history, and beach houses on the Caspian Sea. If you’re going to hang out and wait for End Times, it beats the hell out of living in some sand-swept backwater, with a herd of camels at your doorstep. We don’t think of Iran like this — but it is one of the most beautiful countries in the region.

And that makes it a great place to wait. And did I forget to mention all that revenue from sales of oil? With superpower allies?

Some countries in the region have managed the delicate secular balance of being a Muslim nation, while maintaining a cultural identity. Tajikistan is an imperfect one. They banned the burqa, the Hijab, banned Prayer (Namaz) at public places, and the call to prayer (Azan) on loudspeaker, as well as child marriage. You can be a Muslim mostly in private, but you cannot force others in public to follow your prescriptions. The link above is a Tajik wedding dance.

The fact of the matter is the regime in Iran are actual globalists. They want a homogeneous Islamic State spread around the world. They don’t just want Iran. They want the whole enchilada. And the civilizational process necessary for them to get there is hardly any different from the globalists in the EU, or the declining caste in Washington, D.C. Globalists demand an elite. For the mullahs, it’s them. For the EU, it’s the gang in Brussels. And for the U.S., it’s more a country-wide movement, devoid of geography, but full of Woke. All three groups demand profound censorship. All three groups use immiseration as a tool to create a depressed population. All three groups are spearheaded by detached, bubbled up cohorts that believe in smashing dissent, and can’t understand why anyone would disagree with them. And if you do? It’s execution time. Our own Lefties are already plotting revenge, publicly, if and when they regain power. Susan Rice’s recent statement combines the new domestic D talking points with a deep desire for chaos. No exculpatory reading of the past for her.

Safe in their mountain kingdom, the Iranian mullahs don’t need to import more people in order to rig democratic processes for their agenda. That’s obviously not true in Europe and the U.S. The locals are waking up to the fact that they’re on the globalist’s menus. In the U.S., Biden and his Open Borders plan inflated the population of the U.S. by close to 10% to get those voting margins necessary for Leftie hegemony. Europe is in the process, but only after scandal after horrific scandal of immigrants mass-raping their women and children. The result of all this is that for the efforts toward globalization, which is really a centralization and homogenization operation intended to create the optimal psychosocial dynamics for a depressed population, ruled by some self-selected authoritarian overlords, knocks down the notion of culturally diverse nation-states. What it’s working to replace is any sense of agency and independently generated relationships inside those nations.

The problem is that once you do that — once you manage to functionally destroy Western civilization, either through Woke, or Islam, is you have a non-functional economic system. Modern economies are built on some version of trust. And if you cannot trust your neighbor, especially because they come from a low-trust culture, whose language nor mores you do not share, the best you’re going to end up with is a depressed polis, and tribal dynamics. If you don’t believe, look at all the scandals continuing to pour out of Minnesota. Minnesota is the bleak window into the future the Leftists envision as their response to the global Islamic state. And make no mistake — they are both competing for the same share of the memetic pie.

Into all this is the inevitable push-back from the nationalists. Trump in the US, Viktor Orban in Hungary, AfD in Germany, and one of my favorites, Eva Vlardingbroek in the Netherlands, are the vanguard for reclaiming their country from the globalists. As I’ve said before, they are champions in an orderly Great Decentralization, a coming-down from the dysfunctional utopian dreams of the globalists. For good or ill, our populations are simply not evolved enough for an unfettered, no boundaries global society. What we’re seeing now, with the endless flood of economic refugees from the Global South, Mexico and South Asia, is an uneven, but mostly negative patchwork of integration into already advanced cultures in the West.

The result of this is that informal governmental mechanisms, otherwise known as gangs and cartels, are occupying swaths of the geographic landscape in the Western nations. They operate in collusion with ostensibly legitimate governments in these places. But in order for them to exist, nominal, orderly services seem to not be able to. Looking at the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in L.A., still burned to the ground after last year’s fire, is the sign that the memetic pull from both the lack of sophistication and evolution, as well as cold, hard cash from illegal operations that elects incompetent politicians, is downward. These areas cannot recover, because there just aren’t enough smarts to restore even prime real estate.

If it reminds me of anything in my travels, it brings back memories of my trip to Greece. Greece is a nation with a stellar history — the birthplace of Western civilization. And the native people know it. But the streets suck, nothing really works very well, and the people, with their head cast down because they know of the greatness of their forebears, live in a combination of self-conscious, self-aware shame in all of it. How is it to truly know decline? Be the civilization that conquered the known world. And then has no suitable public sanitary facilities.

So what exactly is going on in Iran? The public uprising is really equivalent to all the movements around the world as an attempt for the people there to revive agency and move on the upward path of all civilizations. It is absolutely a re-nationalization effort. It is a populist movement. It is a freedom-of-information movement. It is a women’s liberation movement. And yes — it is revanchist, in that the temporary goal is to go back to Iranian society pre-1979. Witness the appearance of the Shah Pahlavi’s son as the figurehead.

Because where they are trapped now is in an Islamic globalist hell. Which at this point in time, leads back to tyranny. That train is never late. And make no mistake — the Western Left intends the same for us. Information control, 15 minute cities, driving restrictions through radical taxation, deprivation of relational freedom, and endless pointless rituals intended to make us all miserable — all are what’s on the menu. Think about that the next time you do a land acknowledgement.

You wonder what the Lefties have in common with the mullahs and radical Islam? Here’s hoping you now have your answer.

Case Study — the Psychopathic Manipulation of Medical Authority

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

The Dynamic Duo, demanding that I take them to the dog park

Gotta confess — I was raised a doctor’s brat (an actual colloquial term) and as such, have been on the inside of a medical community for my young life, at least.

But times have changed relationally. And the downstream of this is what we are seeing now, which is a collapse of authority of the medical community across the public health debates of the age. But why?

Some background — my father was an obstetrician in a medium-sized town in the Ohio river valley. Portsmouth, OH, was an interesting place, psychosocially, to be raised. It was a collapsing steel town, straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song, with ties to other resource extraction efforts. Empire Detroit Steel was one of the first big integrated steel mills to be shut down, in 1976. And since I got to watch it happen (I graduated from high school in 1979) from a ringside seat, I got to watch the literal formulation of a new, darker age in America’s heartland. Which still reverberates — especially in the medical community — to this day.

My father was an obstetrician/gynecologist in the community for almost all of his career. And as a doctor, I enjoyed the benefits of health care in what is literally a bygone age. When any of us kids were sick, outside a cold, my father would take us to the hospital when he did rounds. Along the way, he would encounter other doctors doing the same thing. He’d have them check me, and give their diagnosis. Then he’d take that aggregate opinion, and treat us as he saw fit. I knew most of the doctors in the community because of that.

But his socialization was not uncommon. Back then, doctors actually circulated in the community, with the various social organizations and fraternal groups. Knights of Columbus, the Shriners and such. Doctors were not an isolated class — they didn’t run for political office, but outside of that, they were everywhere. Doctors definitely ran the hospitals in town, one of which was owned by the Catholic Church. And their wives showed up in PTAs. They were scarce — there’s only so much time any practicing physician has. But you KNEW your doctor.

My father thoroughly enjoyed all of this. By the time his career ended, he had delivered something north of 4000 babies in Portsmouth. He was constantly running into patients at the grocery store and around town, and loved to hear the stories about everyone’s progeny. He was honored, called ‘Doc’.

And he was far from perfect. As he aged, his alcoholism got the better of him, and that’s a story I’ve told elsewhere. But even in the community, when he got busted by the physicians at the hospital for being a drunk, he still commanded respect. After he dried out, he attended his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly, where he was known as ‘Manny’ (his first name was Manoochehr). In one meeting, a member had a literal heart attack. My father dropped to the floor, and started administering CPR, while someone else called an ambulance. He saved that person’s life that day. And immediately afterwards, everyone in the group gathered to shake his hand, saying “Thanks, Doc!” They all knew. Anonymity simply did not exist in that town.

It’s against that backdrop of relational development that we now have modern medicine. No one knows their doctors outside the hastily scheduled, over-managed but underperforming care that we have now. Hospitals are really not run by doctors any more — they’re run by administrators. Physicians are hired for specific roles and specialties. According to some quick ChatGPT noodling, over 80% of all doctors are now guns for hire with the hospitals they work at. Private practice is scarce or nonexistent. And those are subject to the vicissitudes of administrators working to maximize profits and minimize costs, as well as the concerns of private equity investors. In the for-profit sector, private equity owns somewhere between 22-30% of all hospitals. That means money is the only interest, outside of regulatory pressure.

The memetic shift in such a system is profound. My father, even with his alcohol problems, was known as an extremely competent doctor and surgeon. Through his circulation around town, before the town started depopulating from the steel mill collapse, he maintained relationships with all his former patients. This combination of externally defined relationships (he was an OB/GYN physician) and his friendship gave him powerful ties inside the community. But I also think it defined most of small town practice at the time. He saw his women patients for literally everything. There were no complex systems of referral or care, where insurance got to decide what happened. And as such, he had a strong relational base for all his interactions. He really KNEW people. And people KNEW him. And especially with an OB/GYN practice, there was a historical tradition of lifetime care. A woman would have a baby with him, and later on might get her tubes tied, which then led to a hysterectomy in later life. She maintained a changing, but lifelong relationship with her physician.

And so was the mental model of physician choice, and the importance of a primary care physician was established. As well as the concept of medical authority — the mental model of it sprung from a lifetime of care that a patient might receive from one person, who they developed a profound trust relationship with. This mix of formal and independent assessment implies solid scaffolding. You might pick a physician for a given need or specialty — that’s the title-based, externally defined relationship thing. But you wouldn’t persist with that person if you thought they were incompetent, or didn’t heal you. That’s the trust-based, independently generated relationship part. And that developed a much more complex psychosocial profile inside the community. These relationships were literally wiring the way the community thought about things.

What happened along the way that destroyed this, and turned this model into a psychopathic weapon used against the American public? The first thing that likely triggered this was fundamental labor mobility. Numbers are hard to come by, but only approximately 20% of all people persisted in their hometown from school years to death. There has been some reverse migration (another 20%) but the notion of a primary care physician giving you cradle-to-grave care simply doesn’t exist.

And the minute that happens you now liberate a powerful mental model from its independently generated roots. Now the BELIEF-BASED part becomes the only part of the relationship — what is the physician’s title — as opposed to the DATA-DRIVEN part — the independent relationship you generate with the physician based on whether they heal you or not.

Portsmouth, because of economic collapse, suffered the brain drain across the board that happens in that circumstance. It was so bad, Portsmouth turned into the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, which could be directly attributed to collapse of the medical community. When your smart, complexity-driven thinkers move away, the memetic deficit inside your community to handle complex problems also hits the skids. And who replaced them? In Portsmouth, one of the people was a woman I grew up with — the daughter of a doctor. She drove enormous amounts of opioid use across the region.

It’s not just the immediate effect of losing a competent medical community. That belief-based sense of competency is even further put through the wringer, through the machinations of the managed health care system. When you start adding the effects of economic dislocation, as happened throughout the Midwest from the ’70s-’90s, you have a medical community completely unmoored from personal friendships. Doctors are guns for hire, often not even living in the community where they practice. Instead, they take gigs based on intervals of time in residence in a community — 2 weeks on, 4 weeks off — and live somewhere else. In my most recent health crisis, involving a mesenteric thrombosis, all the physicians that took care of me, AND did my eventual surgery, lived outside of Pullman. One even commuted from Maine. In my case, I was lucky. One of the physicians that managed my care was a former Dean of a medical school, and my surgeon (also from 85 miles away) was top-notch. But there was no way for me to evaluate nor have any meaningful selection authority in my care. No agency.

Once a given memetic structure gets severed from his scaffolding, bad things are destined to happen. People are told “listen to your doctor!” or some such nonsense. But nowadays, people overwhelmingly have no data-driven relationship with that individual. So what happens is that meme is untethered, to be captured by the psychopaths running Big Pharma, to be used to sell drugs. In place of that relationship, we are served up an endless round of ads, telling us to ask for these from that doctor with our non-existent relationship. Only the most diligent of us, doing research, would even find the names of these drugs if we didn’t have the ads. So we are bombarded with odd names, with Woke representations of what the potential patients might look like. These representations are designed to be psychopathically manipulative — for example, most AIDS patients are overwhelmingly homosexual, African-American and male. But the ads themselves display a whole palette of sexes and skin types. The result is paranoia, with the appropriate backside covering when the medical community is actually approached. You didn’t trust them, and for good reason — but the mental model that is played is that if you DON’T trust them, something is wrong with YOU.

This then plays out in all sorts of perverse ways. Consider the vaccination wars. You either BELIEVE in vaccines, or you don’t. And your doctor damn well better believe in vaccines as well, or he’s a quack/crank/whatever. But vaccination as an issue has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. The number of tried-and-true vaccines I gave my kids (they’re now 25 and 27) has at least doubled. And the pressure to increase early vaccines has grown exponentially. Consider the recent fight over the Hepatitis B vaccine for infants. There’s no risk for a child being born with Hep B if the mother doesn’t have it. But it’s one more needle lined up for that infant arm, at the earliest possible moment of life. Does not wanting your infant to get a Hep B vaccine make you an anti-vaxxer? Hardly. But the psychopathic voice behind Pharma-aligned interests, as well as psychopathic voices wanting to establish control over what government is allowed to force on you is never-ending and relentless.

And then there is the never ending pressure from elites for Elite Risk Minimization. Vaccines are supposed to protect you from getting a given disease. What that means is that if YOU get a given vaccine, you’re supposed to be safe from contracting a given disease. But in the context of Elite Risk Minimization, that’s not good enough for them. Everyone else has to get vaccinated, so that there is no chance of even potential exposure. Regardless of the given statistics. What this leads to is a classic psychopathic Double Bind — you must get vaccinated even if others around you are vaccinated and shouldn’t be able to get the given disease. This obvious logical conflict then promotes more craziness in a society already under attack by psychopaths attempting to spread fear on other fronts.

The subtext for all of this is the deep fear of all humans of social ostracism. Not only do you not get to exercise your agency on what gets injected into your body. If you don’t, you suffer social catastrophe, especially in liberal communities. Jimmy Kimmel, during the COVID episode, was very clear about how the elites were going to function. If you were vaccinated for COVID, you could receive medical care for OTHER conditions. If not, tough luck. Worse, you lose your job and livelihood.

And then propagated by psychopathic forces was even more diabolical messaging. One was the gasping COVID patient with Neo-Nazi tattoos, who had refused the shot (which turned out to be a colossal bust) and was now gasping at the black nurse attempting to save his racist life.

As with all things, people figure out the bullshit. But it takes time. And then what happens is fascinating. After living through a couple rounds of this crisis, which REPLACES the formerly healthy, data-driven relational construction that people used to have with their original primary care physician, the people become memetically inoculated from the messaging. The problem is that this, downstream, doesn’t help the society when a real threat comes up. Fool me once, fool me twice, as the old adage goes.

Here’s the point of all this. Modern society, through multiple modes (Pharma, private equity, etc.) psychopathically destroyed the appropriately scaffolded, rational relationship people have with medicine. And attempted to replace it with a monetized model whose beneficiaries were not the people receiving care, but those making money off that care — which weren’t even the physicians. And then that institutional psychopathy reached out to other areas, like the COVID vaccine, and naturally, memetically took up the cause of the elites, with Elite Risk Minimization.

Some notable people are fighting back, like my friend Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who now heads both the NIH and the CDC (at least temporarily.). But there are enormous institutional forces more than happy to pull out the mental models of the past, to ensure their own short-term gains. As with all psychopaths, they have no ‘bottom’ regarding accusations against actors attempting to stem the tide — look at the endless, relentless attacks against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And NOTE — all the attacks will be on the top, superficial level. No nuance given — that’s the knowledge structures piece.

The potential for reform is, quite honestly, bleak. As doctors overall have, more and more, been disenfranchised from administering these systems, there is only a modest amount they CAN do. They do have patients to care for, after all. But I believe it is only people inside the system that have enough detailed scaffolding to make a difference. Hopefully this piece serves as a crudely written road map of how we got there. And where we have to get back out of. Memetic evolution is always the answer. But it’s a very rough road.

And we’re not going to get there without some realization about the relational decline that got us here in the first place.

P.S. For a primer on the difference between rational, independently generated relationships, vs. externally defined, belief-based relationships, do read this piece. Trust vs. Loyalty, folks. Both have their place, so don’t go in with a pre-bias.